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In the works at the DRSC--a change to our home page. Stay tuned. And suggestions welcome.

Quote of the Week: Ready or Not

There is a widespread view that scientific discoveries are more or less inevitable, and that it makes little difference whether or not a particular individual makes a discovery at a given time: if the time is not ripe for it, it will not be understood and will have little or no effect on future events; if the time is ripe, then someone else will soon make the discovery anyhow.

The history of Mendelism is one of the often-cited examples here. According to this interpretation, Mendel's paper was not understood in 1866 because the time was not ripe ... To me, this account seems greatly oversimplified--though it must be admitted that the development of the subject would probably have been much the same, even to the dates, if Mendel's paper had never been written.

It it true that the paper was ahead of its time, but it was not difficult to understand, and it seems unlikely that it would have remained unappreciated for so long if it had appeared in a less obscure journal, or if Mendel himself had published the further cases that he reported to his letters to Nageli.

A History of Genetics (1965) by A.H. Sturtevant, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.

To the Rescue!

What's on my desk today? A report co-authored by the DRSC's own Matt Booker,

Kondo et al. (2009) Cross-species RNAi Rescue Platform in Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics. PMID: 1972085

An accompanying web tool and resources are available through the DRSC.

Quote of the Week: Pseudo-Obscure

There seemed to be no end to the tricks that [Drosophila] pseudoobscura could do: one stock had odd sex ratios, another diplayed what seemed to be maternal inheritance, and so on. ... Pseudoobscura was so full of new tricks because it was an undomesticated, wild organism that had not yet been stripped of its natural genetic diversity, as melanogaster had long since been.

In, Lords of the Fly (1994) by R.E. Kohler, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL). pg. 260.

Breaking Report: RNAi Screen Analysis

Recommended reading:

Birmingham et al. (2009) Statistical methods for analysis of high-throughput RNA interference screens. Nat Methods. 2009 Aug;6(8):569-75.

PubMed PMID: 19644458.

Breaking Report: RNAi Saves Chocolate!?

Caribe dos Santos et al. (2009) dsRNA-induced gene silencing in Moniliophthora perniciosa, the causal agent of witches' broom disease of cacao. In Fungal Genetics & Biology.

Breaking Report: RNA Biology & Immunity

On my desk today:

Gruber et al (2009) Ars2 links the nuclear cap-binding complex to RNA interference and cell proliferation. In Cell.

Sabin et al (2009) Ars2 regulates both miRNA- and siRNA- dependent silencing and suppresses RNA virus infection in Drosophila. In Cell.

With accompanying comment.