Exam Week Enchiladas

While this was a regular journal club week, we decided to forgo a journal article and simply enjoy a break from studying and some enchiladas from Si Senor. We had a guest (family member) join us, and we were happy to spend an hour relaxing!

Here are the fruit fly ratings of the enchiladas (where 5 is high and 1 is low):
Average rating: 3.54
Number of 5's: 2
Number of 4's: 2
Number of 3.5's: 3
Number of 3's: 4
Number of 2's: 1
Number of 1's: 0

Some of the comments:
"its the sweet taste of the end of the semester"
"kick-free"
"nice balance of flavors"

Now that you have taken a green chili enchilada break, get back to studying for finals ;)

Our first meeting of the new year is (tentatively) scheduled for Tuesday, January 18th. Keep an eye out for our new location in the Math department.

Hope everybody has a wonderful break!!!!

November Math Bio

We had a "two for one" journal club on the 2nd. One paper was about reading scientific papers (for our new students), then we started to look at a Wolbachia paper. We continued to discuss the Wolbachia paper and model at our next workshop. The students worked to dissect some of the equations in the paper- and we learned about the importance of "hidden 1's".

Our green enchiladas were from Habaneros (yes, back to green), and were devoured in short order. The average dipteran rating was 4.0 (on a 5-point scale, where 5 flies is the highest rating). Some of the comments included:
"chick-a-licious"
"very chicken-y"
"moderately spicy"
"not spicy enough"
"too spicy"
"perfect spice"
"good flavo(u)r"

As you can see, we have a range of tastes and tolerances for the green chile!

Here is a link for Habarenos, in case you'd like to form your own opinion:
http://www.urbanspoon.com/r/196/1441245/restaurant/Habaneros-Fresh-Mexican-Food-Las-Cruces

October Professional Development Workshop

Our two senior students were kind (brave?) enough to share their draft personal statements for peer review. We had looked at suggestions for writing strong personal statements, so we had these in mind as we reviewed for our Math Bio seniors. They both got constructive feedback, and will be able to use this to revise their statements before their applications for grad school are submitted.

October Journal Club and Welcome Reception

We welcomed our new Math Bio students with a journal club and *red* enchiladas- yes, RED. As you can see from the reviews, red is just not as popular with the Math Bio group here at NMSU. So while we will go back to green in the future, it was good to have tried something different!

Stable Isotope Workshop

Dr. Boecklen presented an introduction to stable isotopes in ecology on Tuesday (June 1). We learned about two important aspects of stable isotope analysis (and the associated math): diet reconstruction and dietary changes (aka isotope incorporation dynamics). As we discussed the diet reconstruction, we looked at a number of equations that would allow us to solve for dietary components. The one that we are still contemplating, and will be looking at in our next journal club, is the mixing model approach. We will be paying particular attention to the some of the assumptions of this model.

And of course the "bottom line" is to always pay attention to the number of equations and the number of variables that you have (this will not be news to the math crew!).

Looking forward to our paper and discussion in two weeks- stay tuned. Oh- and we'll be sampling and reviewing enchiladas- yum...

Summer Orientation

We had our summer orientation session on Tuesday, May 18th. We (of course) served enchiladas. I am sure you are wondering where the photo-documentation of said enchiladas is....well, it didn't happen this time. BUT, by now you have a very good idea of what green chile enchiladas with chicken look like (see any previous post!). The enchiladas were from Si Senor this time, and there seemed to be a wider range of fruit fly rankings than usual. The average was 3.4 fruit flies (out of a possible 5), the range was from 2 to 4.5, the variance (based on my back of the napkin calculation) was 0.64, giving a standard deviation of 0.8. How about that for some Math Bio summary of the fruit fly rankings of Si Senor's enchiladas? In general, people liked the cheese quotient (high), but wished for a little more heat: "bam it up a notch".

We also had good fun mocking the delicious, Canadian and magnetized water (I'll let you guess which of those properties made us laugh the hardest. Shouldn't be too hard, eh?)

And of course we reviewed the summer schedule, expectations and logistics. Our three RE-1 students will be working in labs, attending workshops and journal clubs, doing lots of reading, and working on developing a formal plan/timeline for what they need to do (and when) for their next steps (graduate school, medical school etc.).

The last week of the summer will feature student presentations, the post-test (part of our assessment and evaluation plan) and the BBQ. So stay tuned for updates over the summer!

April 30th "Picnic"

We had planned an end-of-semester picnic in Presidio Park, but high winds and unseasonably cool temperatures kept us inside. But we still had a lovely time, with a great assortment of sandwiches, orzo salad and cream cheese pound cake (yummm) (see photo).

We presented Math Bio Graduation Cords to our two graduating seniors to wear as part of their regalia at graduation on May 8th, and wish them well in their future endeavors! We will miss them, but are happy that they are graduating, and know that they will do us proud.

We are looking forward to our summer program. We have three RE-1 students who will be doing their summer of intensive research. One will be doing a Wolbachia project, one will be working on a mosquito project, and one will be doing a stable isotope project. But more about that later- stay tuned for summer updates. We are planning to meet twice a month for journal clubs, workshops and research presentations (and of course, to enjoy enchiladas!)

March 30th Journal Club and Enchiladas

We had a great journal club today. We were looking at a 1991 Nature paper on Wolbachia infection and its spread in California (Turelli and Hoffman, 1991. Rapid Spread of an Inherited Incompatibility Factor in California Drosophila. Nature 353: 440-442.)

Here is the "skinny"
1. The math experts are still questioning Equation 1- more to come- they are investigating earlier reports to verify some of the assumptions about the equilibrium in equation 1.

2. We had some discussion about the effect of "F"(fecundity) on the "wave" of transmission. I would have to say that the "biological/English" explanations helped sort out the math explanation... the lesson is that we all have to mind our p's and q's and read carefully to track the impact of changes (up or down) on parameters of the equations. See enchilada-marked example above (first image)

3. As Wolbachia seems to adversely impact fecundity in infected females, we can probably put this is in the "+/-" column entry into ecological species interactions- i.e. a parasitism. See whiteboard above (second image)

4. We had enchiladas from Chilitos. They were definitely unique- and definitely spicy! Here are some comments:
"spicy"
"cheesy"
"yummy chunks of green chile" (see photos- there were definitely large pieces of green chile!)
"a nose runner"

The overall score was a 3.75 (on a 1-5 scale, with 5 being the highest). The spicy was definitely a selling factor for the NM students- perhaps not so much for the Canadian faculty! (see images 3 and 4)

Stay tuned for more updates on equations/models for Wolbachia spread in Drosophila populations!

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. 11th Math Bio Speaker

We were lucky to host Smadar Ben-Tabou DeLeon as the inaugural NMSU Math Bio speaker on Feb. 11th. Her talk dealt with gene regulatory networks in the sea urchin- particularly networks regulating sea urchin development.

The NMSU Math Bio students got to have lunch with Smadar, and the faculty universally enjoyed their time with her.

We have been continuing to look at gene regulatory networks- Jen Curtiss presented a workshop to the Math Bio students on Feb. 16th (and did a great job of answering all their questions!), and we will be looking at a gene regulatory networks paper at our next journal club. Stay tuned to hear about the paper, and the next batch of enchiladas that we will be sampling.

Here are some links for the Davidson lab (where Smadar is a postdoctoral fellow), and some of Smadar's papers:

Davidson Lab

Smadar's Papers

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.