4 new papers from the lab over the past few weeks. Thanks everyone!

Niwa et al BMC Evol Biol. 16:173 shows that fly SoxN can substitute for Sox2 in vivo in mice. Fabre et al Proteomics 16:2068 is the first output from our Fly embryonic proteome project. Lee et al., in press in PLoS Genetics and available as a preprint in bioRxiv, looks at the effects of heterozygosity on the Drosophila regulatory network. El-Sharnouby et al is on bioRxiv and defines H3K27Me3 levels as a mark partitioning the genome into TADs.

The considerable debate/discussion on my twitter feed regarding HIF journals prompts me to post the 1st edition of Cool. This appeared on the Glasgow Genetics Department Fax machine in the summer of 1990, shortly before I left for Cambridge. It has been on my office wall ever since and acts as a timely reminder that it is not where you publish but what you publish that should matter. The full version in all its glory is here – Cool-Article

 Rob White and I are extremely happy to have been awarded a BBSRC research grant to study how Hox transcription factors achieve target specificity. We are currently looking for a Postdoc to join the project who has an enthusiasm for understanding the genome biology of this ancient class of transcription factors (see advert till 18th Jan).

Well done Katerina, thesis bound and submitted before the deadline. I am sure she now needs a considerable period of sleep!

We done to Sarah’s PartII project student Max Fitz-James, he generated some pilot DNAse-seq data from melanogaster and yakuba embryos. Around 12 million mapped reads from the IonTorrent generated ~ 1.5 billion bases of sequence. Not so bad for an 8-week project.