Although I have been in US for 5 years now, this is the first retreat I attended, but as a post-doc not a student.
Usually, in a retreat, new coming students are introduced to the departments and they are welcomed by many research talks/posters to help them make their rotation decisions. While I was in UNC, retreat was the top 1 topic during student-chairman meeting, but due to various reasons, it did not come true before I finished my study. Fortunately, we had yearly welcome breakfast, half-yearly student-chairman bear chat, and monthly happy hour. It was not difficult to integrate into the department quickly. Of course, a two-hour seminar with 15-min talk from various faculty members helped me to make my rotation decisions.
The UCSF students in cell biology, biochemistry, developmental biology and genetics (four programs together formed the tetrad program) have another level of welcoming. Actually, other programs, such bioinformatics, biophysics, chemistry & chemical biology joined this retreat as well. The Biomedical Sciences Graduate Program will have another retreat some time soon, but it is mainly for students on the Parnassus campus, while this one is for the students on the Mission Bay campus.
Yesterday, after the faculty talks, high grade students gave an amazing welcome event to the new students. New students were introduced and competed in different games. Existing students using movies/interviews/shows to demonstrate the colorful life in graduate school. It really reminds my graduate school, also my college life ......
Back go the main point of the this blog, summarizing what I heard about the researches going on the Mission Bay - UCSF. There are five sections of faculty talks and two poster sections. I will only focus on the talks.
The first section was started by Dr. Ron Vale, who just came back from a very small town in India - where he was looking for inspiration. He mainly talked about his lab's effect to understand the nano-level mechanical mechanism of kinesin motor. The question he was discussing is about the step length during kinesin movement on the microtubule using quantum dot as the cargo and doing single molecular imaging and optical trap focus manipulation. I really like two things he mentioned during the talk. The first is that in order to ultimate understand cell behavior, we need to know exactly how each protein functions. The second one is a quote from Feynman "when I cannot create, I do not understand". (PPP...PPP forms helix, while GGGS is flexible)
Dr. Hiten Madhani just had his baby born several months ago, so he started by showing photos about his genetic experiment result. He is using yeast genetics to do system biology research, really focusing the question about how to control the noise. He mentioned a paper using CFP/YFP dual reporter system to classify noise - extrinsic, intrinsic. And based on talking with his student, they are using EGFP/mCherry doing similar things in the lab.
Dr. Ulrike Heberlein is studying fly behavior, focusing on why female flies like to lay egg on 5% acid media, but have other activities on normal media.
Dr. Shaun Coughlin is using mouse model studying proteases.
Dr. Jeff Cox is study Mycobacterium tuberculosis's ESX-1 secretion system. His model is that ESX-1 put virulence factors into macrophage to compromise the host immuno-response and help the survival of TB. My question is what is the role of EXS-1 during the acidification during the phagosome maturation. For me, it is more emergent than the host T cell immuno-attacking.
Dr. Danica Galonic Fujimori is using some modified histone to hunt for new DNA demethylases.
Dr. Hana El-Samad is in close collaboration with Hiten, using yeast doing system biology research.
Dr. Brian Black is a hard core developmental biologist and focusing on the vascular system. The approach he used is identifying common DNA sequences in the transcription factors.
Dr. Torsten Wittmann was trained in Dr. Clare Waterman-Storer, and is studing microtubule dynamics using various 2D/3D cell culture model. The story he talked about is CLASP phosphorylation regulation. According to his postdoc, the microscope his lab used is Nikon TE2000 with perfect focus and spinning disk confocal, a NA 1.4 100x objective and 300 ms exposure time for 150 frames with a interval between 1-5 seconds.
Dr. Katja Brueckner talked about her lab's results from a RNAi screen using a fly cell line (not S2).
Dr. Stavros Lomvardas is a junior faculty after his postdoc with Richard Axel. Of course, he is studying olfactory system, really focusing on the one receptor one neuron question.
Dr. Jonathan Weissman did not give a talk about his famous E-MAP and related observations. Instead, he talked about ERAD using CRY* degradation as the read out. The basic question he wants to address is how ER uses cytoplasmic degradation system to discard the un-folded proteins. I believe the story has been published on cell as a cover story. What they found is that the sugar modification on the protein is really the clock for degradation.
My current boss gave a very clear presentation about how 3D polarity is regulated via PIP2 and PIP3. He just came back from London and drove 3.5 hours....
Dr. Charles Craik is using NMR study proteases.
Dr. Robert Edwards gave a exciting talk about how different types of vesicles in synapse are determined.
Dr. Keith Yamamoto talks about steroid hormone and GBS recognition.
Dr. Holly Ingraham talks about nuclear factors for endocrine development.
Dr. Sandy Johnson talks about the evolution of transcription regulation.
The last section was chaired by Dr. Bruce Alberts. He started the section by saying that all the faculties in the section are very ordinary ......
The first speaker is Dr. Dyche Mullins. He did not talk about his lab's most recent work on the actin monomer gating model or the S2 cells data. He talked about the prokaryotic cytoskeleton, the story about the ParM, and its role during plasmid segregation in E.coli. He talks really fast, and the movies are great.
Dr. Nirao Shah gave the most interesting talk about how could a female mouse think and behavior as a male mouse.
Dr. Dean Sheppard gave the only immunology talk. It is about Integrin.
Dr. Dave Morgan gave the last talk about chromatin separation during mitosis. In the middle of his talk, his daugther called. I learned a very good trick that is using TetR-GFP to label DNA region with TetO, using LacR-GFP to label DNA region with LacO. This also reminded me how Dyche labeled the plasmid.
By the way, I saw a secretary was typing during the talking with an amazing speed using a devise linked to Thinkpad. Very fast and accurate.
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