Re:

were you happy with the results. how are things personally.

Hi Jeffrey, I apologize for not getting back to you earlier with more information about our dinochicken summit, as I left immediately on a couple lecture trips, one of which was to Madrid, from which I returned home early this morning. In Madrid I did a TED like talk and then my wife Vanessa and I did a couple of joint lectures on the Dinochicken project to the National Museum (of natural History) developmental biology folks and a high school genetics class, both in Madrid. It was fun!

The summit was very interesting, and certainly helped the different groups get a handle on what each group is up too. Of course, only two of our groups are actually working on the project, as the Georgia group is simply proposing to help out. The first talk was by Hans Larsson and he discussed the different processes he and his post docs had attempted, one of which was very interesting. They had stuck a tiny tube around the developing tail of an early embryo to confine the area in which the vertebral somites form with the hope that the tubing would direct cell growth in a long linear direction rather than expanding laterally. Their hope was that extra somites might form. Interestingly it appears from their initial experiments that that happened, but now they have to determine if extra somites formed or whether instead, it pushed the pelvic girdle forward simply exposing more somites. Either way, it was an interesting experiment showing that simple modifications could alter the morphology in pretty extreme ways.

The Georgia group talked about a variety of things including creating transgenic chickens, enameling teeth, changing multi-investigator limb proportions, projects and discussed changing systems mouth shape for data for sharing inclusion and of analysis. Brian Conde, who has worked on multi-site, text mining and data sharing and storage.

Susan Chapman of Clemson University, who I brought in at the last minute, and who studies chicken tails, talked about her research on a chicken called an arucana which is rumpless, missing its tail.

At the end my post docs talked about their current gene screens to determine timing of development and apoptosis of the hands and tail.

I would very much like to share the videos with you, but am not sure how to proceed as they are quite large files.

Everyone was really happy with the summit, and the group has put together their proposal of which they have in their dropbox site which I would like to share with you if there is a way to do so. I will also send it once I have evaluated it. It was completed while I was away, and I need to explain a few things about it that they as a group would not know, particularly about some portions which would not be tax deductible.

As for my personal life, I just asked Vanessa how she thought it was going and she said that since we had just spent a week together in another country and she had not given any thought to killing me, it was a good sign. :) She and I get along just great, but then we are both dino nerds and work virtually all the time.

Hope you are doing great as well!! Please give my best to the girls.

All the best,

Jack