Olena Riabinina

Am currently at the MBSJ 2016 conference in Japan – very nice conference and very happy to be in Japan for the first time! Lots of new people to meet and a lot of exciting experiences to have!

I wrote a short Wikipedia entry on the Q-system, and it has just been published:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q-system_(genetics)

Woo hoo! This is my first non-monetary contribution to the Wiki 🙂 Many thanks to Olya for inspiring me.

Last Friday I had an hour long Skype chat with students of the Department of Biological Application and Technologies, University of Ioannina, Greece. The chat was organised by the teaching fellow Dr Lefkothea-Vasiliki Andreou as a part of the course on English for Academic and Scientific purposes. I really enjoyed discussing a scientific career and a PhD abroad (otherwise who would ever want to hear about my early career miseries?!) and learning about the worries and aspirations of the next generation of scientists. Overall, I think it was a great initiative – many thanks to Lefki for organising it and to all participants for their time!

Following the press release of our paper, Hopkins’ Catherine Gara wrote a longer piece about our work. Also, Chris gave a short interview to the BBC about our mosquitoes. Exciting! 🙂

Our books chapter on the Q-system is now available online. A pdf may also be found here. This chapter was written almost two years ago, and even though we tried to update it, some information may be already obsolete. Hopefully still a useful read!

Now I understand how the press releases work. Before Hopkins published one for our paper, our Altmetric score was 22. Now, 3 days after the press release, the score is 262. The news agencies simply copy-paste or copy-paste-shorten the press release and the accompanying image on their webpages. Voila!

Our mosquito QF paper has been reported in the Voice of America news:

http://www.voanews.com/a/fighting-malaria-by-changing-the-flavor-of-humans/3547023.html

The VoA website was my favourite resource for practicing understanding spoken English  while preparing for my TOEFL test in Kiev in 2004 🙂

Today I received an email saying that now I am recognised as Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK). Not sure how it will help me, but Hurray! 😀

After a long wait, it is finally online: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13010

By introducing the Q-system into malaria mosquitoes, we were able to target their olfactory neurons that express receptors of the OR family. This kind of experiment is very standard in flies, but so far has never been done in mosquitoes due to the notorious difficulty of finding the gene enhancers in the mosquito genome. By analysing the GFP expression pattern in our transgenic mosquitoes, we found out that the OR neurons project to two areas of the brain: the antennal lobe and the SOG. It is highly likely that SOG also receives gustatory inputs, and possibly also integrates them with the OR olfactory signals.

Dug out an old-ish Dome article about out mosquito research: