The man in the bat

Some of Jack Pettigrew's colleagues consider him a little batty - after all, he has long hypothesised that fruit bats are distant relatives of humans.

Now evidence is growing that he may be onto something, as Graeme O'Neill reports in the January/February 2008 edition of Australian Life Scientist.

Pettigrew has argued for two decades that megabats, like flying foxes, evolved twice from unrelated mammalian ancestors. We delve into the evolutionary past to trace the descent.

We also talk to the man behind the Bindeez breakthrough, Kevin Carpenter, a biochemical geneticist who discovered exactly how several children managed to get the recreational drug GHB in their systems after swallowing Bindeez beads.

The January/February edition is ALS' annual Lorne conferences issue, where we dedicate 40 pages to local and international speakers on the topics of protein structure and function, cancer and genome. This year, we interview:

• Chris Voigt from the University of California, Berkeley, on his research into engineering microbes and bacteria to perform biosynthetic processes, such as manufacturing super-strong spider silk

• Helen Saibil, from Birkbeck College London, on the molecular chaperones, a group of proteins dedicated to helping other proteins to fold

• Frances Shannon, of the John Curtin Medical School at ANU, on mapping the chromatin landscape to elucidate how the packaging of DNA controls immune-related gene expression

• Peter Klinken of the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research, who is characterising two genes involved in blood cell differentiation and leukaemia

• David Bowtell of the Peter McCallum Cancer Centre on the role of BRCA1 and BRCA2 in ovarian cancer

• Ian Frazer of the Diamantina Institute for Cancer, Immunology and Metabolic Medicine on new developments in cervical cancer immunotherapy

• Peter Little from the National University of Singapore on coordinated changes in gene expression

• Jeff Craig from the Murdoch Children's Research Institute on the epigenetic components of childhood and adolescent disease

• and finally, Stephen Sarre of the University of Canberra on temperature-induced sex reversal in reptiles.

We also discuss the link between music and the evolution of the modern mind with University of Western Australia neuroscientist and keen musician Alan Harvey, how IT works at Sydney IVF and what's happening in the world of the supercomputer.

As always, ALS features all of the latest products and methods on the market in Lab News, the latest scientific literature in our Bookshop and local and international conference dates in Events.

If you would like a PDF of the January/February issue of ALS, please email kate_mcdonald@idg.com.au (Beware - the PDF is 6MB).