Monthly Archives: February 2009

Lines of communication

Posted on by
4

In our March Editorial we discuss the need for improved communication between scientists and the public via dedicated science media centers as well as nontraditional personal blogs.

In an effort to do our part in improving lines of communication we are working to transition methagora from a commenting forum to a more traditional blog. We intend to use the site to discuss some of the papers we publish, provide information on upcoming conferences we will be attending (and hopefully reports on these conferences), as well as anything else we think would be useful to our readers. Keep an eye out for our upcoming entry on the most downloaded articles from our January issue.

This is a work in progress and we welcome feedback from our readers on what information you would like to see here.

March’09 Conferences

Posted on by
Reply

Editors like to attend scientific conferences to get the pulse of the community and find out what is new and exciting in different subject areas. I like to think that face-to-face interactions also help ensure that editors aren’t viewed as faceless cogs in an uncaring publishing machine. It is also a welcome change of scenery after staring at a computer screen for hours on end, day after day.

To alert our readers to upcoming conferences of methodological interest that a Nature Methods editor will be attending, we will begin posting monthly conference schedules on Methagora. We hope this information is helpful to you and look forward to meeting some of you at these meetings. Information on the Nature Methods editors can be found here.

Biophysical Society Annual Meeting (Boston, MA) Feb 28-Mar 4

No editor from Nature Methods has ever attended this meeting before (though not for lack of desire). But this year Associate Editor Natalie de Souza and Nathan Blow, who edits the Technology Features, will both be attending.

Pittcon 2009 (Chicago, IL) Mar 8-13

Nathan Blow will attend this conference whose technical program and exposition cover laboratory science technology over a wide array of scientific disciplines.

Systems Biology: Networks (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) Mar 18-22

It seems that we rarely miss the various network biology meetings anymore and they always have something interesting. Natalie de Souza is planning to attend.

Perspectives in Stem Cell Proteomics (Hinxton, UK) Mar 22-23

This meeting, devoted to the intersection of two interesting fields, will be attended by Associate Editor Allison Doerr.

ESF Ligand Binders Workshop (Alpbach, Austria) Mar 23-25

Our publisher, Veronique Kiermer, will be attending this meeting.

Computational Cell Biology (Cold Spring Harbor, NY) Mar 24-27

We have published some computational biology papers and are interested in pursuing this field further. Editor Dan Evanko is planning to attend.

In terms of longer term plans, I will be attending EBSA 2009 in Genoa Italy. The conference will be running from July 11 to 15 so I’m hoping the weather will be beautiful. Italy itself was certainly beautiful the one time I visited previously and I’m looking forward to seeing a different part of the country.

For those who don’t know, EBSA 2009 is the 7th Congress of the European Biophysical Societies’ Association (EBSA). It was formed in 1984 with the objectives to advance and disseminate knowledge of the principles, recent developments and applications of biophysics, and to foster the exchange of scientific information among biophysicists. EBSA 2009 provides special incentives for young investigators and the 7th Congress will celebrate 25 years of EBSA.

GPCR oligomerization redux

Posted on by
Reply

Many receptors form functional dimers or higher order oligomers on the cell surface. A number of reports have also shown with various levels of certainty that G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) di- or oligomerize. In December 2006 we published an Article by Simon Davis and colleagues that challenged how bioluminescence resonance energy transfer (BRET) was being used to investigate GPCR dimerization. In particular, conclusions about β-adrenergic receptor (β-AR) dimerization were challenged. The paper was accompanied by a News and Views article by Martin Lohse.

This controversial paper was quickly followed by Correspondences by Michel Bouvier and colleagues and Salahpour and colleagues arguing against the findings. The controversy also seemed to attract a number of papers describing alternative methodologies for examining receptor oligomerization, including time-resolved FRET and snap-tag technologies (Maurel et al., 2008) and sequential BRET–FRET (Carriba et al., 2008).

Fast forward to this week and we see the return of Martin Lohse in a paper where he, Moritz Bűnemann and colleagues describe a dual-color fluorescence recovery after photobleaching (FRAP) microscopy approach relying on antibody-mediated receptor immobilization to analyze receptor oligomerization. They focus on β-AR oligomerization (the subject of controversy in the original papers) and show that β1-AR shows transient interactions while β2-AR can form stable oligomers.

What does this mean for the conclusions of the original study? That is difficult to say. FRAP can’t distinguish between direct and indirect interactions so it is even less suitable than BRET for determining the type of interaction that is occuring, but it can distinguish between association of two vs many receptors.

It does appear that the Davis paper highlighted the need for the community to be more conscientious in providing experimental controls using constitutive interacting and non-interacting receptors. This is certainly a positive result and the tools now seem to be in place that will help researchers settle these questions.