#DROS2013 Day 4

Highlights from day 4:

Transcription factor talk from my (academic) aunt. I went to a talk by a grad student in the lab of my summer advisor's graduate advisor (my academic aunt?) on using bacterial 1-hybrid assays to catalog bHLH transcription factor motifs. Eventually, we should be able to have a motif for every transcription factor in flies.

Fly hearts double as kidneys. Not only does GFP tagged with a secretory sequence end up in the fly heart, but the heart also expresses orthologs of proteins that are kidney-specific in humans.

Cell-cell connections might serve as buffers for noisy gene expression. In the fly egg, ring canals maintain wide connections between populations of somatic cells. Proteins expressed in one cell can diffuse to others, perhaps maintaining homogeneity in the egg.

Undergrads rule! My friend and colleague Bethany gave the only undergraduate talk at the conference, on her work with microtubule severing proteins in the fly testis.