We’re back!

Hi All,

You might have noticed the month-long hiatus on the blog since crowdfunding ended, but we’re back! And we haven’t been completely idle either.

Daniel and Dario checking BUB’s blood sample 🙂

First, we sorted out all the nitty-gritty admin stuff to transfer the money to our account. It has now arrived, so we can actually pay our sequencing facility, and are pretty much ready to go! For this, Daniel and Dario will re-extract some DNA from BUB’s blood sample in the coming week, to make sure that we have enough high quality DNA for our experiment. (No worries, we don’t need a new blood sample for this, we can work with the previous one we got.) Then, hopefully by mid-July everything will be ready to load onto the sequencer… We’ll keep you posted with more details, pictures and videos!

And since we’ll be delving into science soon, just a reminder – in case you have any kind of question or comments, please feel free to contact us anytime! We’re always happy about feedback.

Also, our collaborator Leslie Lyons visited Daniel and Dario in Berlin this week. They discussed a lots of interesting (and important) details on how to proceed with sequencing and analysis. In case you missed it, they wrote about it here.

Leslie was here!

Hi All,

we have been busy in the last weeks with a bunch of background work (mainly thinking about how to document our sequencing effort in a way that you get the most of it) and also catching up with our “other work” which we postponed during the crowdfunding campaign.

And there was one date that we were very very much looking forward too: Yesterday!

Yesterday, Leslie Lyons visited us at the MPI and Dario and I (Uschi, couldn’t be there) were so happy to meet our collaborator in person for the first time! She was in Europe for a conference and that was a great opportunity for a detour via Berlin on the way back to the US.

Leslie gave a talk about the 99 cat lives project and apparently first results are coming it. All of it sounded very exciting and it looks like much can be learned about the various cat breeds and diseases from the genomes. And the work she and here group is doing over at the 99lives will be essential to interpret the data we’ll get from sequencing Bub’s genome.

We discussed details of sequencing and analysing LilBUB’s genome with her and how we can make the most of the funds we’ve raised so far (more on that in a later post). All in all, it was a very fun, productive and more than pleasant visit.

As we had a perfect summer’s day, we let it ring out with a dinner and Berlin showed her beautiful side and it was wonderful to sit outside and chat cats, genetics and everything else.

Anyway everyone, expect more on this site soon!

Thank you!!!

Hi all,

Wow!!! The LilBUBome crowdfunding is over. We have to admit that these last 40 days of fundraising (and the previous days of preparation) have been quite exhausting – but also unbelievably exciting. This was our first experience with crowdfunding, and we always had the fear of not getting funded. Not because of the money, but because it would have meant that we did not manage to explain how amazingly interesting this project is. So we are really glad to have finally reached our goal (and a little bit more), and about all the positive feedback we have received!

A BIG THANK YOU goes undoubtedly to the 248 backers who decided to join the project. We appreciate not only your support but also your interaction with us. All of you contributed to achieve the first essential part of this project. And now it is our turn!!!!!

So, what´s next?

Our stretch goal: Maine Coons. The sky’s the limit for awesome cat genetics!

A Maine Coon with polydactyly. [by Jorbasa, via flickr]

As we posted yesterday, we have reached the full amount needed to sequence BUBs genome. Thanks again to everyone who made this happen! But the fundraiser is still not over! You can still donate on the experiment.com site and we have 5 more days to prove that we can do even more awesome science – with your help! Here’s what we propose to do:

We’ve set our stretch goal to 30.000$ and the money that we raise will go towards Leslie Lyons’ 99 Lives Cat genome sequencing initiative. More specifically, we would like to sequence another cat breed, with traits that resemble those of LilBUB. This will help us understand BUB’s genome data better. At the same time we will get insight into the health and biology of this breed. And after a long discussion with Leslie this afternoon we have settled for Maine Coons.

Here’s why:

We made it! You are all amazing!!!

With a wonderful donation we just went over the line and made our target of 6,500$!!!!! You are guys are totally amazing, for having made this reality!! We just can’t stop grinning – like a Cheshire cat…

So, first of all:

Same, same, but different? Meet Rosie, another cat with osteopetrosis.

One of the great things about the LilBUBome is that it’s an open science project, so we get to interact a lot with people who are interested in our science. One of these people is Ann, whom we got to know through Mike (BUB’s dude). Ann had contacted Mike a few months ago, because she also has a cat, Rosie, who was recently diagnosed with osteopetrosis, and Ann wanted to know more about the disease.

Of course, we were really fascinated by Ann & Rosie’s story: osteopetrosis is a rare disease, and even more rare in cats. BUB seems unique, because she’s the only cat with a juvenile (early-onset) form of the disease. Rosie’s case seems different.

A furball with piercing green eyes. Meet Rosie, another cat with osteopetrosis.

For example, she only developed osteopetrosis when she was older, so – unlike BUB –  she’s actually quite long and lean (BUB is probably so small because her osteopetrosis forced her bones to calcify and stop growing too quickly).

Also, Rosie has different symptoms than BUB, and also received a different treatment. However, similarly to BUB she seems to be doing fine, despite living with osteopetrosis.

So, similarly to human patients with osteopetrosis, the disease seems to be rather diverse in cats, too. To get a better picture, we asked Anne to tell us Rosie’s story.

Ask an Expert – Prof. Uwe Kornak on BUB, Osteopetrosis, and Genetics.

Hi All,

as we mentioned before, we are connected with experts in cat genetics and bone disorders, who back us up on all the expertise we don’t have. With their help we think we have a very good chance of finding BUB’s mutation once we get her genome sequence.

It also has the big advantage that we can ask them basically anything. And so we did, when we asked Prof. Uwe Kornak from the Charité University Hospital about LilBUB, types of osteopetrosis and the diffences between mutations in animals and humans. Read on……

23 days later, this is where we’re at…

Hi All, 17 days of crowdfunding to go and last week was totally insane: we found a mutation in LilBUB’s genome, which we think causes her polydactyly (!). Also, traffic and support for the project just exploded – we’ve now raised an unbelievable 4,699$ (only 1,801$ to go)! We’ll be bringing you some more scientific content next week, but until then, there are a few things we wanted to say:

Congratulations! It’s a Hemingway.

Hi All,

Last week Daniel was busy in the lab, doing a first experiment for the LilBUBome. And as we briefly posted yesterday: he found something really cool! We actually just wanted to test whether the DNA we extracted from BUB’s blood was of good quality. So we decided to do this by checking the DNA sequence of BUB’s ZRS.

Well, it turns out that with this experiment, we found out why BUB has polydactyly AND discovered at the same time that she’s (very, very, very distantly) related to Ernest Hemingway’s cats!

Here’s the full story. It’s a bit long, but worth the read…

NerdTalk

OK people. We wanted to let you know how things sound and feel like in the lab. So this one is for those of you who are interested, have a little more background knowledge, or are scientists. These are some notes on what exactly we did to sequence LilBUB’s ZRS in a way that I’d write it in an email to Uschi or Dario or how I could reconstruct the experiment I did in my lab book.