̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Steve Russell

Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� signs San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment

cjb250 — Mon, 08 Jul 2019 08:09:15 +0000

DORA’s recommendations call for institutions not to use journal-based metrics, such as Journal Impact Factors, as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles when assessing researchers’ contributions in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions. It encourages universities, researchers and others to assess research on its own merits rather than on the basis of the journal in which the research was published and highlights the need to capitalise on the opportunities provided by online publication.

Professor Chris Abell, Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research at Cambridge, said: “ ̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge is committed to producing excellent research. By signing up to DORA, we want to demonstrate to our researchers that we value the quality and content of their research regardless of how and where it is published.”

Professor Steve Russell from the ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Genetics, will chair the DORA Working Group, which will oversee the implementation of the DORA recommendations.

“This is an important step for the ̽��ֱ��, particularly for early career researchers where all too often career progression is based on judgments using flawed metrics,” says Professor Russell. “By signing DORA the ̽��ֱ�� is making very positive step towards developing a culture where research excellence is assessed by the quality of the work and not by the title of the Journal where it is published.”

DORA calls on institutions to be explicit about the criteria used to reach hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions, clearly highlighting, especially for early-stage researchers, that the content of a paper is much more important than publication metrics or the identity of the journal in which it was published.

In addition to research publications, DORA recommends considering the value and impact of all research outputs (including datasets and software) and a broad range of impact measures including qualitative indicators of research impact, such as influence on policy and practice, for the purposes of research assessment.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ��’s HR Division will begin implementing a number of changes to ensure the agreement’s recommendations are reflected across its recruitment, reward and promotions schemes.

Brigitte Shull, Director of Scholarly Communications Research & Development at Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, added: “ ̽��ֱ��principles of DORA align with our open research strategy and ongoing activities around improved metrics and recognizing author contributions. By signing up to DORA, we want to help improve the way the quality of research is assessed and expand the range of tools to better account for a variety of research outputs.”

In February, Cambridge became one of the first UK universities to publish a position statement on Open Research. Its statement set out the key principles for the conduct and support of Open Research at the ̽��ֱ��, which aims to increase inclusivity and collaboration, unlock access to knowledge and improve the transparency and reproducibility of research.

̽��ֱ��recommendation to sign DORA at the ̽��ֱ�� was made by the Open Research Working Group, chaired by Professor Richard Penty, and at the Press by the Open Research Steering Committee, chaired by Brigitte Shull.

̽��ֱ�� ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press announced on 8 July 2019 that they have signed up to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), a set of recommendations agreed in 2012 that seek to ensure that the quality and impact of research outputs are 'measured accurately and evaluated wisely'.

By signing up to DORA, we want to demonstrate to our researchers that we value the quality and content of their research regardless of how and where it is published

Chris Abell

kkolosov

Microscope

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

Yes

Licence type:

Public Domain

How close are you to a fruit fly?

amb206 — Wed, 08 Jul 2015 08:22:55 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

Each morning a yeasty smell drifts through the basement of the Genetics Building. Research technician Huai Xue Lin arrives early to cook the food needed for millions of fruit flies. ̽��ֱ��Drosophila is not a picky eater: it thrives on a mix of cornmeal, sugar and yeast, mixed with agar to make it solid. ̽��ֱ��fly kitchen operates an impressive takeaway service, supplying not just the Fly Lab on the first floor but also Drosophila research facilities all over Cambridge.

As their name suggests, fruit flies are the small insects that appear on hot summer days to feast on the surface of ripening fruit – or sup on any wine or beer left out. Once Drosophila detect something sweet and sticky, they are annoyingly persistent but they pose no threat to human health.

Fruit flies are used by research groups throughout Cambridge to learn more about how genes determine development. That’s because, despite looking remarkably dissimilar to us, Drosophila have much the same fundamental biological make-up as humans. Significantly for medical scientists, they share 75% of the genes that cause disease in the human population.

Drosophila are not hard to raise in huge numbers. Their eggs hatch within 24 hours. ̽��ֱ��larva that crawls out eats and grows non-stop for about four days. It then pupates for around four days before emerging as an adult fly. ̽��ֱ��fly is sexually mature and ready to mate within a few hours.

Because fruit flies reproduce so fast, researchers use them to track ways in which traits, including genetic abnormalities, are transferred down many generations in a relatively short time. Drosophila are also easy to anaesthetise using carbon dioxide – and make a speedy recovery. These characteristics combine to make the fruit fly a valuable model for research into genetics and associated fields.

̽��ֱ��potential offered by Drosophila as a tool for understanding the principles of heredity was first explored in the USA early in the 20^th century when Thomas Hunt Morgan won the Nobel Prize "for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity". British scientists began to use fruit flies as a research organism after the Second World War with the first fruit fly facility established in Cambridge in the 1960s.

Professor Michael Ashburner recalls the early days of Drosophila research in Cambridge: the flies were reared in milk bottles in a temporary lab located in suburban Cambridge. Ashburner and colleagues carried out extensive fundamental work to determine how genes control complex traits such as height and weight. He went on to become a pioneer in the use of computing in biology, developing a standardised vocabulary that enables scientists’ observations to be read by a computer.

As a key player in the sequencing of Drosophila by a public-private consortium, Ashburner helped to ensure that the research was made publicly available. His book Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced is a compelling account of the highs and lows involved in a hugely ambitious project involving a number of institutions.

Today the Fly Lab is a modern facility on the first floor of the Genetics Building. Along one wall are storage units housing thousands of tubes containing live fruit flies. ̽��ֱ��tubes provide a ‘library’ of ‘stocks’ with each stock relating to a particular research project. ̽��ֱ��Lab is equipped with 24 work stations for researchers working on aspects of genetics. In addition, batches of Drosophila are also supplied to research groups working elsewhere in Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��fields covered range from neurodegenerative disease to parasite interactions. ̽��ֱ��most recent addition to the Lab’s clients is the Hannon Group at Cambridge Biomedical Campus which is using Drosophila as one of many pathways for developing new methods for cancer diagnosis, treatment and prevention.

Fly Lab manager, Dr Simon Collier, says: “Flies can be used to address a wide variety of problems in biology and medicine. ̽��ֱ��Fly Lab provides a resource not just to fly workers in Cambridge but elsewhere in the UK and Europe. I believe we can be especially helpful to research groups that are largely clinical but also want to incorporate the fly model into their research.”

A quick look at the website FlyBase gives a picture of the myriad ways in which the humble fruit fly is contributing to medical science. ̽��ֱ��Cambridge branch of FlyBase is headed by Professor Nick Brown who also leads a research lab in the Gurdon Institute.

̽��ֱ��Brown Lab uses Drosophila to investigate how bodies are built and how, during the development of an organism, cells attach to each other by means of ‘cell adhesion’. ̽��ֱ��processes which determine the growth of an adult organism from a single cell, the fertilised egg, are extremely complex and involve receptors known as ‘integrins’. By understanding the ways in which ‘faults’ can occur in fruit flies, the group will be able to contribute to the development of treatments for human conditions such as skin blistering diseases, muscular dystrophies and aberrant blood clotting.

A lab headed by Professor Steve Russell is investigating the genes that control the activity of other genes, particularly a group called ‘Sox genes’. These types of genes are important in both humans and flies as they often control the behaviour of tissues by regulating the particular set of genes active in each cell. ̽��ֱ��Russell lab is looking particularly at development of the central nervous system and gonads. These are just two of many groups using Drosophila as a model in research.

A side room at the Fly Lab is set aside for Sang Chan, the Lab’s Microinjection Specialist. He injects fly eggs with DNA so that researchers can produce gene mutations in flies that will enable them to track the functional effects of genes – and thus identify the genes regulating the production of particular protein configurations or the behaviour of other genes.

Looking through a powerful microscope, he uses an instrument called a ‘micromanipulator’ to push a needle into a fly egg about 0.5mm in length (roughly the size of a coarse grain of sand) in order to inject DNA roughly equivalent in volume to a millionth of a drop of water. It took Chan six months to acquire the fine motor skills needed to carry out this delicate task with reliable accuracy.

Running the Fly Lab is a round-the-clock enterprise that requires constant attention to detail. ̽��ֱ��storage units are kept at a constant temperature of 25 degrees, the temperature at which Drosophila thrive best. Double doors and other precautions prevent flies from escaping: many are transgenic and, as such, considered a potential ecological hazard. ̽��ֱ��Lab has strict hygiene regulations designed to keep the presence of mites (which live on fruit flies) to a minimum.

“More is known about the biology of Drosophila than possibly any other animal on earth. For this reason alone, I expect that Drosophila will remain a vital model organism for many decades to come. ̽��ֱ��short generation time, relatively simple genome and ease of culture are as useful today as they were in Thomas Morgan’s time,” says Collier. “Our increasingly molecular and cellular perspective on human disease has brought medical research to a level where humans and flies are understood to be remarkably similar and means the fly can be an effective model for human disease.”

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: G is for the world's second fastest animal, which flanks the escutcheons of King's College Chapel and is playing an important role in research into treatments for osteosarcoma.

Inset images: D. melanogaster dorsal open wings (Sylwester Chyb and Nicolas Gompel); Actin cables in Drosophila nurse cells during late-oogenesis. At this stage, nurse cells die and extrude their cytoplasm into the developing oocyte. This process is required for viable eggs to develop. Cyan = DNA (DAPI), highlighting the nuclei; Magenta = Actin (Phalloidin), highlighting enrichments of Actin that form across the cells (Tim Weil and Anna York-Andersen, Weil Lab); Drosophila embryo - the large stripe that you see along the centre of the embryo is the developing nervous system and subsets of neurones have been labelled in green (Holly Ironfield and Eva Higginbotham).

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, F is for Fruit Fly and the myriad ways that they are helping with medical research.

More is known about the biology of Drosophila than possibly any other animal on earth. I expect that Drosophila will remain a vital model organism for many decades to come.

Simon Collier

Tim Weil and Anna York-Andersen, Weil Lab

̽��ֱ��reproductive machinery of Drosophila melanogaster. Two ovaries (upper right) connected by the oviduct.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution