Drosophila Genomics and Genetic Resources

Hawaii
(April 30- May 5) Arrived in Honolulu on Thursday, April 30th around 9:30AM after overnight flight from Kansai International Airport. (unfortunately, have only very little in way of pictures for this leg of the trip before being asked to write a blog, but will provide many pictures of Honolulu and University of Hawaii on Friday when I will be in lab finishing up our work).

Here is a picture of my colleague, Dr. Brian Oliver, with whom I worked with during the stay in Hawaii (picture of Ken Kaneshiro who hosted us in his laboratory at UH to come).

Fortunately there were plenty of collected Drosophila grimshawi for Brian and I to dissect and we spent 5 days collecting numerous tissue samples from this important model species. D. grimshawi is one of the 12 sequenced genomes, part of the "12 genome" initiative begun a few years ago. However, unlike the other 11 species, D. grimshawi is one of many Hawaiian Drosophila species endemic to the islands and we therefore know far less about this species compared to many of the other 11.

San Francisco

(May 6-8) San Francisco State University

I flew into San Francisco Wednesday night, May 6, and gave a seminar at San Francisco State University on May 7 and visited faculty on May 8. I was delighted to present my research to the student and faculty and to inform them about the wonders of the DGRC! They were quite impressed with my Japanese (actually, they were amazed that I knew any Japanese at all!).

(May 11-14) UC San Francisco

I was able to obtain 12 samples, triplicate samples of four tissues: Testis, Seminal vesicle, Sperm, and Accessory glands and successfully delivered them to our colleagues at UC San Francisco Proteomics Center, arguably one of the finest proteomics centers in the world. We hope to obtain valuable data from this species which will help us understand better the evolution and functional genomics of the entire Drosophila species group, including D. melanogaster.

Here are some pictures of UCSF campus:

This is the building that houses the Proteomics Center (Directed by Professor Alma Burlingame, Professor of Chemistry and Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF). Here are the URLs for this wonderful research facility:

http://msf.ucsf.edu
http://prospector.ucsf.edu/prospector/mshome.htm

Here is a picture of Dr. Burlingame.
I was helped enormously by Dr. Juan Oses Prieto who is collaborating with us on this project.
And Kris Casler who makes everything run smoothly.

UCSF is a very large campus with a world famous medical school and medical research center-

San Francisco is beautiful! (Like Kyoto!)

Here are some pictures of the the Fisherman's Wharf area:

And the Pacific Heights/Nob Hill area:

A view from Lafayette Park of Mount Sutrow and Sutrow Tower

And a view from the top of Lafayette Park towards the Golden Gate Bridge

(KTL）