Minutes of Mirth – 8 February 2017
Popcorn Journal Club
hosted by Michelle Henstridge
Popcorn Journal Clubs: We’re trying out a new format for journal clubs to encourage all members to participate. It involves a large bowl of popcorn that is passed around the table. The person with the popcorn speaks, asking a question about the paper or talking about an aspect of the paper that caught their interest.
Michelle’s Choice:
“Cold-sensing regulates Drosophila growth through insulin-producing cells” by Qiaoran Li and Zhefeng Gong (2015).
This paper describes a mechanism through which temperature alters body size in fruit flies. Temperature is known to affect body size in many animals, with lower temperatures generating animals of larger size. However, to date little was known about how temperature affects animal growth to achieve these changes. Li and Gong demonstrate that a group of cold-sensing neurons directly affect insulin secretion – a peptide hormone known to regulate growth and body size. These findings provide insight into how size-temperature interactions are mediated.
