#sickpapes

Xiol, J., Pietro Spinelli, Laussmann, M.A., Homolka, D., Yang, Z., Cora, E., Couté, Y., Conn, S., Kadlec, J., Sachidanandam, R., Kaksonen, M., Cusack, S., Ephrussi, A., Pillai, R.S., 2014. RNA Clamping by Vasa Assembles a piRNA Amplifier Complex on Transposon Transcripts. Cell 1–20. doi:10.1016/j.cell.2014.05.018

A truly sick pape, like any great work of art, weaves together the threads of many diverse historical influences into an intricate - and preferably blacklight sensitive - tapestry. Thus, a true artist reveals a web of connections between his or her historical predecessors, connections that may seem obvious in hindsight, but which would in fact never have existed without the artist’s work. For example, consider two of the major literary works that have influenced us here at Sick Papes™: How To Bag The Biggest Buck of Your Life by Larry Benoit, and Untruths About Animals by Orville Lindquist. Without our important artistic output, the now-obvious spiritual kinship between these two masterpieces would have been lost on a generation of biologists. This is undoubtedly what Borges meant when he wrote that “every writer creates his own precursors.”

Today’s Pape weaves together two particularly deep and powerful historical threads. The first is a 16th century Swedish King; the second is the epic world-historical tale of the silk industry. When these two stories come together on the loom of cell culture and in vivo validation, you’ve got yourself a fucking insane tapestry. 

King Gustav Vasa (1496-1560) was the patriarch the Vasa noble family of Sweden, which ruled until 1654, when the family died off with no heirs. This lack of heirs is the reason why Vasa is also the namesake of the vasa gene: when the first group of sterility genes were identified in Drosophila (i.e. those mutations that cause sterility), these genes were all named after extinct European royal families that had left no heir: Vasa, Tudor, Valois, Staufen. Vasa is a molecular marker for germ cells of nearly all animals, which makes it a very fascinating and widely studied gene. Infuriatingly, however, we still don’t have a clear understanding of exactly why this gene is necessary for producing heirs.

Keep that in mind as you allow your mind to drift to China in 3,000-5,000 B.C., when people first domesticated the silkmoth. For the following 7,000 years, we have been going nucking futs for silk, and have continued to pour unimaginable resources into understanding the biology of this wildass insect. Whereas Drosophila has flourished as a model organism because of its relatively simple genetics and rapid reproduction, the silkworm Bombyx mori has none of these advantages (i.e. it’s got 28 pairs of chromosomes and is wicked friggin’ labor intensive to keep). But our insatiable need to be clothed in silk at all times has kept this bugger well-studied for thousands of years.

One of the completely unpredictable outcomes of all the silkworm research has been the discovery of an immortalized cell line where a very specific biological pathway is active: the Piwi pathway. (The Piwi gene, like Vasa, is necessary for ferility, but it’s namesake is not European royalty but rather an acronym for “P-element induced wimpy testis”). The Piwi pathway, which we’ve spoken about before, is a recently discovered pathway that utilizes small RNA molecules (“piRNAs”) to protect the genome against transposons and other pieces of destructive jumping DNA. The silkworm-derived cell line is apparently the only cell line currently known where the Piwi pathway is active, and therefore provides one of the most biochemically tractable opportunities to pick apart this freaky pathway.

SICKPAPES SPECIAL EDITION ON SUPPLEMENTAL DATA!!!

Supplemental Text 1 from:

Deshpande, G., Zhou, K., Wan, J.Y., Friedrich, J., Jourjine, N., Smith, D., Schedl, P., 2013. The hedgehog Pathway Gene shifted Functions together with the hmgcr-Dependent Isoprenoid Biosynthetic Pathway to Orchestrate Germ Cell Migration. PLoS Genet. 9, e1003720.

Like many people, I have conflicted views about the reams of Supplemental Data that accompany the online versions of most papers published these days. At its worst, Supplemental Data is nothing more than a grainy video of a bat performing fellatio, overdubbed with thumping techno.  At it’s best, however, a truly great Supplemental Figure reminds me of the famous scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan loudly fakes an orgasm in a crowded restaurant, except that for me, the orgasm is real, and in those moments of ecstasy I am neither woman nor man but purely divine flesh of the GodBody incarnate. This Supplemental Text Document right here is one of those good ones which make me very glad to be living in the “Era of Supplemental Data,” as it was recently dubbed by Francis, the first pro-Open Access Pope.

To be real with you, I’ve never seen a Supplemental Document quite like this one. While Supplemental Data most often includes extra methodological details, additional controls, large datasets, or tangential experiments requested by reviewers, this one is a long-form prose essay about a decade-old scientific disagreement between these authors and a different lab. We here at SickPapes don’t take sides in this quagmire - both of these labs are outrageously hot and time-tested - but we find it surprisingly compelling to read such an emotionally honest and open piece about a genuine scientific disagreement. 

Our story begins in 2001, when Paul Schedl’s lab published a paper in Cell providing evidence that a secreted protein called hedgehog is involved in guiding embryonic germ cells as they migrate towards the future gonad. In one key set of experiments, they ectopically expressed hedgehog in abnormal locations, and showed that germ cells migrated incorrectly. This was interpreted to suggest that hedgehog is sufficient to influence germ cell migration.

As far as the public was concerned, the next thing that happened was In 2007, when Ruth Lehmann’s lab published a rebuttal, with the unambiguous title “hedgehog does not guide migrating Drosophila germ cells.” In the Lehmann lab, the hedgehog ectopic expression simply did not affect germ cell migration as it did in the hands of the Schedl lab members. This was not a matter of subtle differences in methods, this was literally a direct repeat of a simple experiment, giving different answers. Both labs are highly respected, and this discrepancy was hard to explain without getting a tad bit disrespectful. 

Which brings us to explaining why this new Supplemental Essay from Schedl’s lab is so sick: it explains what was happening behind the scenes at Cell the whole time. First, they reveal that the Lehmann lab’s 2007 paper actually originated as a technical comment sent to Cell in 2002 in response to the original 2001 article. The Cell editors asked the Schedl lab if they wanted to retract their paper, and the Schedl lab said “No.” Instead, they came to an agreement with Cell that an outside, independent researcher would repeat the hedgehog experiments, communicating only with Cell and not with either of the labs in question (Shout out to Stephen DiNardo, stepping in to do a major solid for the scientific community without any personal glory).

After an extended drum-roll, Dr. DiNardo told Cell that his independent experiments confirmed the original results from the 2001 Schedl lab paper, not the Lehmann results. So, what does Cell do with this important finding? Nothing. Instead of publishing this informative back-and-forth, they didn’t make any of this public, and just let everyone gossip for a decade. And, according to the Schedl lab in this Supplemental Text, this gossip-filled silence has “undermined [their] credibility in the scientific community, jeopardizing [their] careers.” Damn, Cell - that is some cold shit. I wish more folks would publish Supplemental Emotionally Honest Essays detailing the strife that various journals put them through. At the least, this might add fuel to Randy Schekman’s dope protest against journals like Cell.

We here at SickPapes have obviously spent the past several years reaching out to a wide variety of porno mags, with hopes of initiating a collaboration. Our goal was simple: to use our vast fame and influence in the scientific community (and beyond) to call bullshit on the troves of "evolutionary psychology" pop-science out there about human sexual behavior, which we feel often lacks a certain je sais exactly quoi called "data."  

When we finally met MOMMA TRIED, we were ecstatic. MOMMA TRIED is a "literary nudie mag" which aims to appeal to all sexualities and types of people out there. 

For their first ever issue, we interviewed Dr. Vincent Lynch about the evolutionary ideas surrounding the female orgasm, particularly on the elaborate just-so stories that societies have concocted to explain the apparent differences between the male and female orgasm. Dr. Lynch is an outrageously sick molecular biologist who has given birth to a beautiful series of papes on human evo-devo, many about the evolution of pregnancy. As a graduate student, he wrote a single-author take-down of a particularly suspect dataset, and it was incredibly rad of him to sit down with us.

To read this exclusive interview, you'll have to order this physical, glossy, nudie mag from this website. Or, if you're in New Orleans on November 23, 2013, you can go to their launch party!