Yob, Spatial Transcriptomics, and Boston Dynamics

Today I Learned:

1) New in Science this week: English scientists have isolated the gene responsible for maleness in an important malaria species, which they dub Yob. Mosquitos (and, apparently, many other insects) use an XY sex determining system much like humans, but we don't know what gene actually causes maleness in most of those species. In the mosquito Anopheles gambiae (which, if I recall correctly, is one of the major vectors of malaria), maleness is determined by Yob, which turns on when the male egg is fertilized and never turns off. Yob changes the way another gene, called doublesex, is spliced as an mRNA. Through a mechanism that isn't yet know, this causes the mosquito to turn male.

The authors of the paper tried silencing Yob in male mosquitos, and also tried adding Yob transcripts to female eggs. Silencing Yob killed males during development. Adding Yob to female eggs caused them to develop as males. This could be really useful in a gene drive* as a way to force maleness through a population, which could be a pretty efficient way to wipe out a population.

*A gene drive is a genetic construct introduced into a population that forcibly inserts itself into the sister chromosome of whatever chromosome it's expressed on, ensuring that every descendent of an organism with the gene drive gets a copy of the gene drive, and that *its* children also have the gene drive, and so on. This can be used to "drive" a desired gene into a population, even if it doesn't particularly raise fitness. They have also been proposed as a mechanism for wiping out the select mosquito species that carry malaria, either by forcing maleness, forcing succeptibility to some normally-harmless insecticide, or other means.

2) Also from Science: There's a new kind of RNA-Seq out of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden that can produce a full transcriptome (more or less) with pretty good *spatial* resolution (order of magnitude tens of micrometers). Here's the gist of the protocol -- you slice up the sample you want to sequence using the usual histological methods (usually a really sharp, cold knife). You lay each layer out on a grid of sequencing primers, barcoded by location. You somehow reverse-transcribe all the RNAs and amplify in-situ, then extract all the amplified DNA and sequence it. Then you can reconstruct where each read came from based on its positioning barcode.

3) Google (actually, Alphabet, now) has indicated that they want to sell Boston Dynamics! For those not in the know, Boston Dynamics is an extremely well-known robotics lab, in the field of robotics, which is probably most famous for building BigDog (check it out on youtube if you haven't already. If you have, check it out anyway and note the videos of its more advanced descendants.) Why?

Apparently Alphabet didn't think Boston Dynamics aligned particularly well with the way they run things. In particular, Boston Dynamics' manager, Andy Rubin, apparently has a management style that doesn't mesh well with the rest of Alphabet. I guess Alphabet figures it's better to sell off Boston Dynamics, make some profit, and let another company do something cool with them than to fire the management and try to rebuild it.