Our Big Picture Science interview is featured in NSF Science360 Radio.  Check it out!

The beta-catenin paper is officially online! Congratulations Kibeom, Jay, Tom, Andrew, and Harry for the excellent work. Also an author is Bryan Ryba, who helped us with the project a couple of summers as SURF and Amgen fellow. Check out the paper, where we describe a novel cis-regulatory element in the Wnt pathway and a novel role for beta-catenin acting as a signal and a feedforward sensor: Two-Element Transcriptional Regulation in the Canonical Wnt Pathway.

We dedicate the paper to the late Eric Davidson, who had many suggestions for the project, and whose presence we deeply miss.

Andrew leaves the lab to join the biology graduate program at Northwestern. Good luck Andrew, it was so much fun having you in the lab, visit us when you come home.

And we have more new people in the lab! Welcome Angel Galvez Merchan and Ashley Chen. Angel is a rotation student from the Biology program. He is setting experiments to tackle important aspects of fold-change detection in the Wnt pathway. Ashley is a rising junior at South High School, Torrance. She is building a movie set to tape jellyfish swimming.

Lea gets a chance this week to breathe a little from a whirlwind year of writing papers, writing grants, and going on trips to give talks (… including the cherished ones down the memory lane to Princeton and Woods Hole).

And another young student has arrived to the lab. We welcome Paola Benefo from Berea College. Paola is an Amgen Scholar, who is working with David to probe the regenerative capacity (or the lack of it) in jellies.

We look forward to a fun summer as young students are beginning to pop in the lab to try their hand at doing experiments with cells and jellies.  This month we welcome Ivan Schmidt and David Berger!  Ivan is a junior at Flintridge Prep high school, and he is now learning how to do cloning.  David is a sophomore at Caltech, and he is learning how to grow bacteria in the lab.

Caltech released a story on Chris’ paper: Cells calculate ratios to control gene expression.  Thanks to Lori Dajose, who put in a lot of effort to write about our work in a way that non-experts can understand!

Congratulation, Chris!  Chris’ paper came out today.  Chris showed in the paper that Smad signal in the Tgfbeta pathway is sensed in a relative manner.  Clare Yarka and Harry Nunns contributed too.  Check out the paper, it’s open access in PNAS.

Lea wrote a piece for the inaugural issue of Current Opinions in Systems Biology. She described the emerging, intriguing similarities across biological hierarchies, Cross-hierarchy Systems Principles. Also see a wonderful introduction by Arnold Levine on the Future of Systems Biology.

Check out an invited blurb we wrote for Cell Systems on Noah’s paper:  How do cells compute logarithm?

And hooray!!!  Noah’s work just came out in PNAS.  Read the paper: Allosteric Proteins as Logarithmic Sensors.