I was intrigued by a brief news piece in the latest issue of Science to fall onto my desk (the 22nd August issue).  This concerns the recently published genome sequence of Trichoplax adhaerens, a peculiar animal in a phylum I'd never heard of.  That in itself was interesting, particularly as placozoans have a really odd body plan that involves a mere four cell types.  Wikipedia has a nice description of Placozoa, from which the image below comes.

On browsing the web a bit further, I found this movie (Quicktime format) of a placozoan moving.  I presume this would be Trichoplax adhaerens, as this is the only known species in the phylum - a second described species, T. reptans, was apparently described at the end of the 19th century but hasn't ben seen again and it's existence is doubtful.

This event was held on a new course (I understand that it had been used before as the basis for a 25 mile event), and uses the new A428 dual carriageway section from Hardwick to turn at the Caxton Gibbet roundabout where it crosses the A1198.  The event HQ was in the excellent Comberton village hall, about 5 miles from the start.  For this event, the weather was perhaps the warmest i've had all season for a time trial: cloudy skies in the morning had cleared away to brilliant sunshine, and we were experiencing temperatures of around 28 degrees!  There is of course a serious downside for every positive - the wind had beens trengthening all day, and by the time we started it was pretty strong.  Being a new dual carriageway, the course is very exposed, since the trees planted alongside hadn't grown yet.  I whizzed out to the turn doing 32mph a lot of the time, but on turning, had a real struggle to the finish.  The return leg is also the longer leg.

Th course has a lot of potential - the road is new, so the surface is pristine, there wasn't actually too much traffic and the turn seemed straightforward when I reached it.  On a day with rather more moderate wind (or ideally no wind!), this should be really fast.

Here are photos from various time trials. 

For copyright attribution, see notes below the thumbnails.

{gallery}timetrials{/gallery}

Drosophila RNAi screen identifies host genes important for influenza virus replication.

Linhui Hao, Akira Sakurai, Tokiko Watanabe, Ericka Sorensen, Chairul A. Nidom, Michael A. Newton, Paul Ahlquist & Yoshihiro Kawaoka 

Here's an cool page showing academic pedigrees of Drosophila workers: FlyTree.

 It's interesting to see how few steps it takes to get back as far as T. H. Morgan!  For example, here's where I fit in the grand scheme: Robert in FlyTree.

I can recall "O Superman" being something of a novelty hit in the UK charts.  I had heard it via John Peel's show, and always reckoned it was far more than merely a summer novelty hit.  One of my greatest regrets is that I did not go and see Laurie Anderson in Edinburgh on the eve of my final examinations for my degree.

Subsequently I bought a 5xLP recording of United States I-IV, from which her then stage show was abstracted, but that's no compenation!

The header images are all related to Drosophila:

Above: These are the giant polytene chromosomes found in a variety of tissues in Drosophila - these are from the salivary gland cells of the third instar larva.  Calvin Bridges (see picture of the fly lab below) devised maps based on the banding patterns of these chromosomes - maps still in use today.

This evening's event was the final event in the club's series of evening time trials.  A reduced turnout probably reflected the dodgy weather - it was quite breezy and rained quite heavily before we started. 

Despite turning up well before the start, I was the last to sign on, riding at number 15.  I didn't think it was a particularly quick evening, and as my computer was mostly on the blink I was riding without knowing my speed.  I took most of the corners pretty carefully, as they were a bit damp (particularly early on) due to drizzly rain, and got a bit stalled by a slow Landrover driver in Beachampton.  I felt like I was grovelling up the hill, but that's not unusual!  I had Kevin Stokes in my sights from the turn, and finally caught him at about Nash on the return leg.

Here are the current standings in the 2008 Beijing Olympics doping league.

Before the Games, Russia withdrew two walkers and a cyclist over positive test or suspicion of doping.   Bulgaria withdrew its entire weightlifting team due to positive tests for steroids.  The Greek weightlifting team also had numerous steroid positives.

The utilization during mitotic cell division of loci controlling meiotic recombination and disjunction in Drosophila melanogaster.

Bruce S. Baker, Adelaide T. C. Carpenter, and P. Ripoll 

Genetics 1978 90: 531-578. [Abstract] [PDF]

As a postdoc, I worked for several years on the cell cycle in Drosophila.  At that time, the field was just beginning to take off, not least because of the efforts of my then group leader.  Nowadays, I study the ageing process, still using Drosophila, and including modelling the function of WRN, the gene responsible for the progeroid condition Werner's syndrome (WS). WRN encodes a RecQ DNA helicase (unwinds the DNA double helix), but unusually has a second activity, a DNA exonuclease (removes nucleotide bases from the end of a DNA strand). We are currently studing the Drosophila homologue of the WRN exonuclease (which we have named DmWRNexo, and which is encoded by the CG7670 locus).

When trying to demonstrate that a mutant of CG76700 indeed displayed characteristic comparable with defects seen in cell lines derived from WS patients, I recalled reading this paper at the beginning of my postdoc position.