When in college I discovered the joy of throwing decent party. Of late this has taken more respectable form, in us taking part in organizing various meetings, workshops and lectures. This winter I participated in a project unlike most other I had previously. Organizing Jane Goodall's visit to Iceland, which culminated in her talk at the University theater on June 15th. There were more than 10 associations and institutes that put in hours, money and effort to bring Jane here, make arrangements, gather funds and handle publicity.
This was truly a delightful cooperation, and getting to meet the grandest of primatologists was a big honour. Jane took part in a master class for the graduates students at the University of Iceland, and few other international students here, and then gave a brilliant lecture to a full auditorium. Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the former president of Iceland introduced Jane.
It was a true honor to help out in this adventure, and to commemorate that I indulge by posting figure of Jane, Mary Lewis her right hand, and the organizers.
I enjoyed the great fortune of attending a meeting on new model systems to link ecology and evolution, held May 8. - 11. in Heidelberg. D. Tautz and D. Weigel organized the meeting which brought together people studying evolutionary and ecological questions, interleaving genetic, organismal, microbial and biochemical data from many organisms. The taxanomic richness was quite intriguing, but also the range of questions and findings. We presented results from the Arctic charr studies, both the morphometric analyses and the transcriptome work, and got quite a lot of good feedback and suggestions. All in all it was a very inspiring meeting, with great atmosphere, talks, people and food. It did not spoil things that I got to visit my friend Natalia and see some great looking starfish.
Im looking forward to the next EMBL meeting on this topic.
Sorry, this entry is only available in Icelandic.
This past Friday (August 29th. 2014) I enjoyed the great fortune of visiting the Center for Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis at the University of Oslo. A colleague from the Chicago years, Lee Hsiang Liow was our host.
The title of our talk was "On rapid and repeated evolution via transcriptional cooption and decay" and the abstract reads like:
The function and evolution of gene regulatory mechanisms and networks has implications for development, diseases and ecology. In this talk I will describe our work on transcriptional evolution, drawing on studies in two systems. I will outline population genetic, morphometric and transcriptomic analyses of parallel evolution of recently evolved dwarfism and associated phenotypes in Arctic charr (Salvelinus alpinus). Secondly I will focus on naturally occuring deletions of transcription factor bindings sites in characterized enhancers of the even-skipped gene in Drosophila melanogaster. Lastly I will outline musings about general principles of evolution by gene recruitment and transcriptional decay, and predictions that follow.
The talk summarized the Arctic charr work that we participate in and two projects on regulatory evolution. I got great questions and had wonderful conversations while in Oslo. Hopefully I can visit again soon.
