Monthly Archives: December 2017

Naked mole-rats, scientific villages and the Oscars of science

Philly

A mainstay of the conference calendar, this year saw the American Society for Cell Biology’s annual meeting complemented by EMBO, European Molecular Biology Organization, for a joint conference in Philadelphia. Senior Editor for BMC Biology, Graham Bell, was in attendance, and here discusses some of the meeting’s highlights

Biology

Paternal genome elimination: investigating a strange reproductive strategy

Mealybugs_of_flower_stem,_Yogyakarta,_2014-10-31

Earlier this year BMC editor, Joseph Hasan, attended the Annual Meeting of the Society for Molecular Biology & Evolution (SMBE) in Austin, Texas. One of the interesting discussions he had was with Stevie Anne Bain, a PhD Student in the University of Edinburgh’s Ross Lab. Stevie is currently researching Parental Genome Elimination (PGE), a unique type of genomic imprinting. Joseph invited her to talk about her research and findings.

Biology

Cockroaches shift gears when speeding up their pace

Cockroaches2

While the locomotion of humans, horses and dogs is well studied, we are now beginning to apply the same principles to insect movement – which may lead us to engineering more intelligent robotic walkers. Dr. Tom Weihmann of the University of Cologne talks us through the study in this blog.

Biology