I wrote a short opinion piece for the December Newsletter for the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The content is reproduced below, or you can read the newsletter version here on page 14 of the PDF. The theme of this year’s ASCB|EMBO Meeting is Cell Biology for the 21st Century. So what skills are essential […]
Tag: cell biology
Tiny Universe: new paper on intracellular nanovesicles
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The paper in a nutshell We have discovered a new class of trafficking vesicle inside cells. These vesicles are very small (30 nm across) and we’ve called them intracellular nanovesicles, or INVs for short. What is a trafficking vesicle? Humans are built from lots […]
Dividing Line: not so simple division in ctenophores
This wonderful movie has repeatedly popped up into my twitter feed. It was taken by Tessa Montague and is available here (tweet is here). The movie is striking because of the way that cytokinesis starts at one side and moves to the other. Most model systems for cell division have symmetrical division. Rob de Bruin […]
Start Me Up: Endocytosis on demand
We have a new paper out. The title is New tools for ‘hot-wiring’ clathrin-mediated endocytosis with temporal and spatial precision. You can read it here. Cells have a plasma membrane which is the barrier between the cell’s interior and the outside world. In order to import material from outside, cells have a special process called […]
Fusion confusion: new paper on FGFR3-TACC3 fusions in cancer
We have a new paper out! This post is to explain what it’s about. Cancer cells often have gene fusions. This happens because the DNA in cancer cells is really messed up. Sometimes, chromosomes can break and get reattached to a different one in a strange way. This means you get a fusion between one […]
Parallel lines: new paper on modelling mitotic microtubules in 3D
We have a new paper out! You can access it here. The people This paper really was a team effort. Faye Nixon and Tom Honnor are joint-first authors. Faye did most of the experimental work in the final months of her PhD and Tom came up with the idea for the mathematical modelling and helped to […]
Come To California
I’ve returned from the American Society for Cell Biology 2016 meeting in San Francisco. Despite being a cell biologist and people from my lab attending this meeting numerous times, this was my first ASCB meeting. The conference was amazing, so much excellent science and so many opportunities to meet up with people. For the areas that […]
The Digital Cell: Getting started with IgorPRO
This post follows on from “Getting Started“. In the lab we use IgorPRO for pretty much everything. We have many analysis routines that run in Igor, we have scripts for processing microscope metadata etc, and we use it for generating all figures for our papers. Even so, people in the lab engage with it to varying extents. The […]
The Digital Cell: Getting Started
More on the theme of “The Digital Cell“: using quantitative, computational approaches in cell biology. So you want to get started? Well, the short version of this post is: Find something that you need to automate and get going! Programming I make no claim to be a computer wizard. My first taste of programming was the […]
The Digital Cell
If you are a cell biologist, you will have noticed the change in emphasis in our field. At one time, cell biology papers were – in the main – qualitative. Micrographs of “representative cells”, western blots of a “typical experiment”… This descriptive style gave way to more quantitative approaches, converting observations into numbers that could be objectively assessed. […]