The problem with being the big kid in the playground is that there will always want to be someone who wants to bring you down. And in the playground of stem cells and cloning, few come bigger than Professor Sir Ian Wilmut.

In recent years, Prof. Wilmut has been hounded through the courts and in the press by some former classmates with a grudge.

Now they have pulled an audacious prank - raising a petition asking to have Prof Wilmut’s recently awarded knighthood quashed. The full petition can be read here (you will have to scroll down through a fair amount of rambling accusations before you reach it).

Quite frankly, this is an embarrassment to science. The campaign to bring this giant down is based on nothing but false logic and heresy. Read more »

Yesterday, I ended a post about FAK, Pyk2 and regulation of RhoA activity by asking “So, what about Rac regulation by [FAK] and Pyk2?”

Today, let’s discuss a paper relating FAK/Pyk2 function studies on Rac1: Regulation of lamellipodial persistence, adhesion turnover, and motility in macrophages by focal adhesion kinase. Katherine Owen, et al., focus on how “Primary bone marrow macrophages isolated from mice in which FAK is conditionally deleted from cells of the myeloid lineage exhibited elevated protrusive activity, altered adhesion dynamics, impaired chemotaxis, elevated basal Rac1 activity, and a marked inability to form stable lamellipodia necessary for directional locomotion.” Read more »

Focal adhesion kinase is an important signaling molecule in integrin-mediated cell signaling and cell adhesion. In FAK genetic knockout (FAK-null) cells, its closely homologous relative proline-rich kinase (Pyk2) is upregulated in FAK-null fibroblasts to partially compensate, but the mechanisms of Pyk2 upregulation and compensation remain undefined¹. A recent study by Yangmi Lim, David Schlaepfer, and colleagues takes a step towards elucidating the latter, by demonstrating both FAK and Pyk2 signaling through a RhoA guanine nucleotide exchange factor (GEF)².
Read more »

It’s February… the end of winter is in sight and with Valentine’s day approaching, romance is in the air in Mendel’s Garden.

In case you don’t know it, Mendel’s Garden is a delicious box of brain candy - a phenylethylamine-packed, monthly collection of blog articles on gene expression, development and evolutionary genetics. This month we have the pleasure of hosting it at Bitesize Bio.

Now, lets take a stroll and see what this love-filled edition of Mendel’s Garden has to offer. Read more »

The Future of Scientific Publishing, and Bloggers talk to bloggers, scientists talk to scientists - How science is communicated is changing rapidly. Sometimes it is difficult to keep up with, in fact.

10 more interesting posts from around the blogs, below the fold… Read more »

If you work at the bench, accurate pipetting is crucial — without accurate it your experiments would be non-reproducible, stock solutions inaccurate and assays would have such large errors that comparing them would be meaningless. But luckily, there’s no need to worry - your trusty, precision micro-pipettes take care of all that for you.

Or do they?

Precision instruments they may be, but the accuracy of micro-pipettes depends on you. You need to maintain your pipettes well, practice good technique and have an understanding of how they work before you can claim to have anything like precision instruments at your disposal.

Here’s how: Read more »