Our BMC Evo Biol paper with the McGregor Lab is finally out !
|
Had great fun last summer in the McGregor Lab in Oxford-Brookes looking at spider Sox. Particular thanks to Chris and Alistair. The result was 2 BioRxiv preprints check them out here: Paese CLB, Schoenauer A, Leite DJ, Russell S, McGregor AP. (2018) A SoxB gene acts as an anterior gap gene and regulates posterior segment addition in the spider Parasteatoda tepidariorum. bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/298448 Now published in eLIFE Paese CLB, Leite DJ, Schoenauer A, McGregor AP, Russell S. (2017) Duplication and divergence of Sox genes in spiders. bioRxiv doi.org/10.1101/212647
Olimpia Bompadre and Maria Ouvarova join the lab for a Sox MPhil and Fat flies PhD respectively. Maria is working on a joint project with Jules Griffin and Kathryn Lilly in Biochemistry. Maria has been in the lab for a while but I’ve beed tardy in updating the website 🙁
It’s summery at the 44th Cambridge Beer Festival 🙂 Our new paper with Rob White’s lab on the organisation of the fly genome into H3K27me3 deleted and enriched domains will appear in PLoS ONE shortly. Preprint is available from BioRxiv We bade farewell to Alex after he successfully defended his PhD thesis on Friday. Thanks for all your efforts Alex and best wishes for your future – in the meantime, enjoy Chinese New Year at home.
We are excited to have Stefan Koestler join the group to work on our BBSRC funded project exploring the specificity and redundancy of fly Sox proteins. After a PhD and Postdoc at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology in Vienna where he did some excellent work on the cell biology of lamellipodia, Stefan spent 4 years in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics, Bogaziçi University Istanbul where he was working on Fly photoreceptor differentiation. Stefan has expertise in molecular biology and considerable experience with static and real time imaging at the cellular level. Here are a couple of his papers you can enjoy.
Koestler et al (2015). FlyOde – A platform for community curation and interactive visualization of dynamic gene regulatory networks in Drosophila eye development. Koestler et al 2013. Arp2/3 complex is essential for actin network treadmilling as well as for targeting of capping protein and cofilin. Mol Biol Cell. 24(18):2861-75.
Rush forward to 1995 & we demonstrate that Dichaete encodes a Sox domain transcription factor that has since kept us in business for 20 years. An honourable mention has to go to Peter Koopman who first generated a PCR product using SRY primers from fly DNA we sent him (see below). Initially skeptical, we quickly found that the PCR fragment did in fact identify a single copy fly gene – as soon as I saw the 1st in situ expression patterns I fell in love and our work on Dichaete began. Thanks to Natalia Sanchez-Soriano, Paul Overton, Lisa Meadows, Carol McKimmie, Gertrude Woerfel, Stephan Ohler, Adelaide Carpener, Shi Pei Shen, Jelena Aleksic, Enrico Fererro, Sarah Carl and Josh Maher, along with the host of undergraduate project students who have worked on understanding the role Sox genes play in fly development over the years. Most of all, of course, Michael Ashburner, who unfailingly and generously supported our work for many years.
One of the things I love about working on the fly is the strong link with the history of Genetics. In the lab, and in many labs around the world, the direct descendants of the Dichaete chromosome from the single female Bridges found 100 years ago are still in use as a valuable 3rd chromosome dominant marker. Peter’s original Polaroid of the PCR with Sry DNA binding domain primers Note the same size band with human, mouse and fly DNA at the highest annealing temperatures – it’s very conserved !
When I did the 1st in situ hybridisations it was love at first sight! When we (simultaneously with John Nambu’s lab, who sadly died last year) showed it was required for segmentation and CNS development, my love of Sox was cemented.
My only single author research paper showed that ectopic expression of the Sox protein led to dominant wing hinge phenotypes
Dichaete turned out to be interestingly complex with extensive 3′ regulatory regions which we were able to map with the aid of dominant mutation breakpoints.
Here is a list of our Dichaete-related papers
|
