Biologists should specialize, not hybridize

Why computational biologists should specialize in their dry skills and not learn other 'stuff', like wet biology, is excellently explained in this column by Assaf Zritsky in this issue of Nature.
As I use to say, computers are just tools like any other ones, such as microscopes or mass spectrometers. You don't ask your favorite microscope specialist to be also an expert in cloning or cell culture. Same thing with computers, we should collaborate not work in isolation.

Randomly distribution grants?

Randomly determining which grants are funded and which ones are not. This looks like a terrible idea, isn't it?
Well, may be not that bad, as suggested by J. Sills in this recent insight in Science. Indeed, currents systems have their limitations and randomly assigning money to the not so bad, but also not so good grants, the middle 60% might not be such a bad idee. Similar ideas have also been proposed to fix our 'democratic' system by example by D. van Reybrouck in his book 'Against the elections'. Why not the same in science?

Did mitochondria arrive late in eukaryogenesis?

Gabaldon just published an interesting phylogenetic analysis of eukaryotic signature proteins. The evolutionary signal that they could recover for those proteins does not support an early aquisition of mitochondria during eukaryogenesis, but to the opposite a late one, suggesting that most of the ancestral eukaryotic cell was already quite complex, when the mitochondria was aquired.

Where ideas come from

Creativity is all important in science. In this previously unpublished note, SciFi author Isaac Asimov analyses some of his reflexions on the act of creating new ideas.

Organizing the second PVC conference

Just to tell you quickly that we started organizing the second conference entirely dedicated to PVC bacteria research.

It will be held from the 2nd to the 4th of June 2015 in Carmona , a very lovely town close to Sevilla, Andalucia, Spain.

The first PVC conference was already successful and we are all looking forward to the second one.

So please start saving the dates. More information soon.

Peptidoglycan in Chlamydia

Related to the discussion about the exceptional status of the PVC cell plan to which we dedicated two recent posts, on the TiM and AvL articles by Devos, and the latest by Fuerst's team, is a new article reporting detection of peptidoglycan in Chlamydia. Liechti et al. describe in Nature a new cell-wall labelling method that finally settles the 50 years old debate concerning the chlamydial anomaly. important question not answered by this manuscript is where is the PG located in Chlamydia? Is it in between the two membranes, where Devos suggests it should be, or is it found outside the outermost membrane, where Fuerst would have it? Although not directly addressed by the authors, it seems pretty clear that the green signal, marking the OM ring is located outside of the red signal, marking the PG (see Fig. 2 or supplementary figure 5). Thus, it seems that PG is located internal to the OM, supporting a more classical G- interpretation of the cell plan, at least in Chlamydia.

Improve your figure

Nice little paper in the '10 simple rules' collection of PLoS Comp. Bio. about drawing better figures.
We could all get something out of this paper. It also contain good references about how to make them colorblind friendly
Like most of the paper in the 10SR series, nice, short and useful.