Our students learned about Saturn the planet at the Air and Space Museum, but #TAGC24 folks can learn about saturn the gene (and atlas!) tonight at posters 876 and 878! Check out our new findings about saturn function and the importance of 3’ UTRs for proper expression.

Five Findlay Lab undergraduates (and their PI) are on the way to #TAGC24, but you’ll have to wait til Saturday night for our posters (876 and 878). We’re looking forward to sharing data on cross-species fertility rescue experiments and regulatory evolution of novel genes!

It’s an exciting day in the Holy Cross Biology Department!!

However, they also noticed the high level of divergence in Dper and investigated further. Using SignalP, they found that while the Dmel (and Drho) proteins are strongly predicted to be secreted, Dper's is not! Could this be evidence of pseudogenization or divergent function?

Another group annotated Ilp4 in D. persimilis. Because this Ilp is expressed early in development, they found no RNAseq data to support their annotation, but used FlyBase resources for Dmel to show this was expected.

Here, students used NCBI Conserved Domain Finder to identify the protein domains and ATP binding residues in Pi3K92E and mapped those sites onto their Dmel-Dmoj dotplot alignment. These key regions/sites were among the most conserved between these highly diverged species!

Enjoying the first morning of the GEP Workshop today, and thanks to the pre-workshop, I just got a Bingo! @GEP_CURE

Congratulations to our senior research student Sara Guay, who graduates from ⁦@holy_cross⁩ today! Here we are at #DROS22 after she rocked a platform talk on her de novo gene research. She’ll be working at MGH in cancer genetics for a couple years before grad school. 🎉🪰🎓

Ready to represent in San Diego at #Dros22! 🪰

Atlas manuscript accepted!!! Congrats to @emilyrivard18 on her first (of many, no doubt) first-author paper, to our great collaborators @bornberglab and the seven total undergraduate authors who are now published!

And they remembered to take the customary picture!!

#FST (Photo credit: HC)

Grateful today as I received dose #2 to all of the researchers, from Dr. @kkariko to Dr. @KizzyPhD, whose work enabled the development of the safe and effective @moderna_tx vaccine.

Finally remembered to take our lab photo at our final lab meeting of the semester! I'm proud of how well our students found ways to work productively throughout this unusual year. We'll tremendously miss our five about-to-be-graduates, but are excited for their next steps! #FST