After arriving back home from the Keystone symposia, I jumped right into preparing for lab meeting where I'm presenting mostly new data. I haven't fully digested the conference, but I'll just leave you with a couple of remarks.
1) The miRNA field is a mess. It remains unclear whether all or any of the proposed mechanisms for miRNA mediated silencing are true.
2) RNA granules are everywhere. Anytime the cell does something funky with it's mRNA (be it NMD or miRNA induced silencing) it shoves the mRNA in question into a granule. But why? Could it be a general response to stress? Paul Anderson had some interesting screens that have some surprising data concerning the composition of two such structures, Stress Granules and P-bodies.
3) Venki Ramakrishnan showed an awesome movie of how the ribosome synthesizes proteins (wmv format, quicktime). Here's a link to the Ramakrishnan lab's movie collection.
4) TOR signaling is whee it is at. This signal transduction cascade is so fundamental to metabolism, protein synthesis, homeostasis and cancer, it is just incredible. And it also affects every step of gene expression - from turning genes on to modifying how mRNA splices, to activating mRNA translation in multiple ways. It is also one of the most ancient signaling cascades in eukaryotes. I'll have to write up some sort of overview. All I can tell you is keep your eyes open - my good friend Max Ma will have an incredible paper coming out soon linking several different concepts into one cool story.
OK I'll leave it at that.
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