Own stuff....

For the last couple of weeks weather has not been so kind here in the Salt Lake. It was snowing intermittently, pretty cold--windy as usual--compared to the average temp. in March-April. In contrast, the same weeks have been very intense, warm and informative academically. I attended three great talks this week: first from Mitch Lazar, UPenn Medicine, who talked about nuclear receptor mediated transcriptional regulation of genes involved in metabolic programs. Mitch is a big stuff in transcription biology and so was his talk. I, together with one of my lab's post-docs, had the rare opportunity to present our work on transcriptional regulation of some metabolic genes we had been working on and got some invaluable inputs from Mitch. Thanks Mitch for attending our talk and for your own great presentation; second from Daniel J Klionsky, U Michigan Ann Harbor, on "Autophagy". Klionsky is a pioneer in autophagy. His lab identified cytosol to vacuole (CTV) pathway of autophagy. Klionsky's talk was very absorbing and he really kept all the audience entertained yet focused during his entire talk. Since I am also working on autophagy, it was a great opportunity for me to attend the talk; third from Zolt Arany, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard. Arany has pushed PGC1 (a family of key transcriptional co-activators of many nuclear-receptor regulated genes) to a new avenue of angiogenesis. His work defies the conventional view of HIF mediated transcriptional regulation of key angiogenic factors (genes). What I learned from Arany's talk is that you really have to think outside the narrow window of conventional and comfortable believes and have to constantly challenge them to emerge as a great scientist as Arany is.

I hope in coming weeks both weather and science will be entertaining alike.