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.