March 2nd Journal Club & Enchiladas

We had our latest journal club on March 2nd. We used the following article as a starting point for our continuing discussion of Gene Regulatory Networks:

Ben-Tabou de-Leon, S. and E. Davidson. 2006. Deciphering the Underlying Mechanism of Specification and Differntiation: The Sea Urchin Gene Regulatory Network. Sci. STKE (361). pe47.

Our discussion quickly delved into math-thinking about how we can figure out how many combinations there are of a certain number of "objects" (in this case, gene circuits or loops). How did we end up with equations involving factorials? Well, Dr. Boecklen was thinking about modeling experiments for small gene circuits and loops, and before you know it, we were deep into math! (see our whiteboard)

As it was a journal club meeting, we also enjoyed enchiladas! This time we had green chicken enchilada's from Andele's. They were really good. The average "fruit fly" score was 4.1 (on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the highest score). Here are some of the comments:

• "creamy and delicious"
• "I really liked the crispy bites of chicken"
• "good spicy flavor" (or "good spicy flavour"- can't remember if this one came from one of the two Canadians in the group!)

As we are assessing student learning with a pre- and post-test, we figured we should use a similar (if more qualitative) approach to assessing enchiladas- so here is a "pre" photo and a "post" photo- as you can see, the twelve of use made short work of a LARGE tray of enchiladas.

Feb 2 Enchiladas

We had 13 people at our first journal club. In addition to discussing our two articles (with lots of discussion about the role of peer-review), we sampled some Roberto's green enchiladas, rice and charro beans.



The beans were a definite hit (here is a recpipe for charro beans: http://www.recipezaar.com/Mexican-Charro-Beans-27484), and the green enchiladas earned an average rating of 3.5 fruit flies (on a scale of 1-5 fruit flies).

[For those of you wondering about a fruit fly ranking scale, our program uses Drosophila (a genus of fruit flies) in different projects at the interface of mathematics and biology- see our program home page: http://mathbio.nmsu.edu/ ; so a ranking system of fruit flies seemed appropriate- with 1 being low and 5 being high]

Of the comments solicited, several of the MathBio students found the green enchiladas to be a tad "weak" on the heat, while the Canadian faculty found the green enchiladas to be plenty hot, eh!

We agreed that we would sample chicken enchiladas in the future, so stay tuned for our next sampling and review.