Great news just in, with a new paper "accepted in principle" at Cell Reports! This work is a collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. Mary Goll, located across the street at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Like our lab, Mary also uses the zebrafish as an animal model, and she is an expert at studying DNA methylation. We are also interested in how DNA methylation controls gene expression during development, so we worked together on a project studying the function of TET genes, which encode enzymes that can help remove DNA methylation (and thus, perhaps, turn on specific genes). Most of the effort was carried out by Mary's very talented graduate student Cheng Li. More details on this work to follow (after it is officially accepted), but postdoctoral fellow Yahui Lan from our lab helped Cheng show that TET genes are critical for the embryo to produce hematopoietic stem cells (stem cells that make all the blood cells).
Yahui (you may go look her up now!) came to us last year from Hong Kong, where she obtained her PhD working in the laboratory of Zilong Wen. She is second author on Cheng's new paper. But in fact, it's already her second (second) author paper, as she also helped our postdoctoral fellow Karen Mendelson with her paper, which was recently accepted to Developmental Dynamics. This was Karen's second (first) author paper (are you following), which is focused on how the sphingosine phospholipid signaling pathway regulates cardiovascular development. Karen's project is itself a collaboration with the laboratory here at WCMC of Dr. Timothy Hla, who is a world-expert in this pathway, and with whom we have already co-published a number of papers investigating S1P in embryonic development. Karen is also first author on a review we all wrote together last year for Development.
So...in summary...2 recent papers accepted that were made possible because of collaborations with 2 different laboratories. And as you surely recall, collaborations were key to the papers published last month by Su-Yi and Miriam.
Why is this so? Why don't we just stay hunkered down in our own lab? Science is actually a very creative and collaborative process and different people bring distinct ideas, perspectives, and skill-sets that can all contribute to push the work in new directions and make us all more productive. This is particularly true in academic science, and it is these collaborations that make lifetime connections, working groups, and (added bonus) friendships.
Finally, sorry but I made a mistake in the last post. We moved here to the Department of Surgery at WCMC in 2009, not 2006. Just a typo, but its important in science to always get the facts right, and double-check the numbers!
Todd
Yahui (you may go look her up now!) came to us last year from Hong Kong, where she obtained her PhD working in the laboratory of Zilong Wen. She is second author on Cheng's new paper. But in fact, it's already her second (second) author paper, as she also helped our postdoctoral fellow Karen Mendelson with her paper, which was recently accepted to Developmental Dynamics. This was Karen's second (first) author paper (are you following), which is focused on how the sphingosine phospholipid signaling pathway regulates cardiovascular development. Karen's project is itself a collaboration with the laboratory here at WCMC of Dr. Timothy Hla, who is a world-expert in this pathway, and with whom we have already co-published a number of papers investigating S1P in embryonic development. Karen is also first author on a review we all wrote together last year for Development.
So...in summary...2 recent papers accepted that were made possible because of collaborations with 2 different laboratories. And as you surely recall, collaborations were key to the papers published last month by Su-Yi and Miriam.
Why is this so? Why don't we just stay hunkered down in our own lab? Science is actually a very creative and collaborative process and different people bring distinct ideas, perspectives, and skill-sets that can all contribute to push the work in new directions and make us all more productive. This is particularly true in academic science, and it is these collaborations that make lifetime connections, working groups, and (added bonus) friendships.
Finally, sorry but I made a mistake in the last post. We moved here to the Department of Surgery at WCMC in 2009, not 2006. Just a typo, but its important in science to always get the facts right, and double-check the numbers!
Todd
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