The last 6 weeks I have spend many hours in improving our homepage. Specially the searchpage has much improved and this will continue in the next few months.

In the first newsletter I promised that we would write something about our work. OK, I will try to explain on what I work.
I work in a research group that investigates the selfincompatability in papaver. Selfincompatibility means that a plant is not able to pollinate itself, because of genetical barriers. It also means that this pollen is not able to pollinate other flowers from plants which are carriers of the same gene. Example:

If the papaver plant carriers the selfincompatibility genes S1S2, it will produce S1 and S2 pollen. This pollen is not able to pollinate S1S2 plants and so no "own" seed is produced. S1 pollen can pollinate for example S2S3 plants, were S2 can not. But S2 can pollinate S1S3 plants and both S1 and S2 can for example pollinate a plant that is S5S8.

The last 4 weeks we have harvested the pollen from our plants in the field. Lucky for us, the summer has started (after one year!) and we had in general nice weather (and so I have a nice brown color now).

How is it possible that S1-pollen can not pollinate S1Sx pollen? It was found that growing papaver pollen tubes were treated with S1-protein they stopped growing. In experiments using calcium sensitive dyes an increase of calcium was found in this tube. Often the calcium moved as a wave through the tube. My project is to find were this calcium comes from. Is it uptake out of the surrounding medium or release out of organelles or both? The first year I have worked with several calcium sensitive dyes to investigate the loading or unloading of organelles. Although I have the impression that it is release of calcium out of the ER, it is difficult to proof, because we have no ER-specific dyes. Therefore, it was decided to stop the imaging work and have a look at a protein that is involved in the release of calcium from organelles, inositol 1,4,5-triphosphate receptors (IP3R), so called because binding of IP3 causes the release of calcium from organelles.

Other people in our group look at changes in the cytoskeleton, phosphorylation, and programmed cell death during selfincompatibility.

Hello, this is Ania. First newsletter from me this beautiful and hot summer. What a difference from last year, when we had exactly one warm weekend. Now it is fantastic!  We travel a bit around and two weeks ago we spent weekend in Oxford. It is gorgeous city, with several colleges and beautiful churches. It has great atmosphere, but I wouldn't really like to live there considering the crowds of tourists and crazy traffic.

Another Saturday we made about 20 km long walk, starting just behind our house. We had also already visited the impressive cathedral in Lichfield, north from Birmingham. 

There is only one small problem: PCR does not work properly when the temperature is too high! At least this is the only reason of my failed experiments I could think about, after checking all reaction components.  I have not written yet, that I got some interesting material to work with. For the moment it is not Lobster, how it was planned, but Aphids. I try to establish the frequency of aphids genotypes present in galls. Gall is sort of a "nest" created by plant around a single mother aphid, which reproduces inside it. The reproduction is parthenogenetic, that means by development of an unfertilised gamete. In this way the whole offspring in one gall should be of the same genotype, identical with the genotype of mother. But it seems not  to be like that and the explanation for genotypic variety is the migration of young organisms between the galls. As a genotypic marker I use short fragments of DNA , known as microsatellites and built of the repeated 2-3  nucleotide sequences , for example: GCCGCCCGCCGCCGCCGCCGCC. They are relatively easy to find, they are well conserved in the species, but they can differ in length between the individuals. By sizing this fragments it is possible to find the differences as small as in one nucleotide. To get the sufficient amount of this DNA for sizing I try to use PCR technique. Lets how it will work, when the temperature outside drops down.