Professor Alan Cowman of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute will deliver the Rubbo Oration at this year's Australian Society of Microbiology (ASM) annual meeting, being held in Melbourne next week.

Deciphering vertebrate development, sorting out the roosters from the hens and taking on bird flu - dare we say, all in one fowl swoop - that is the job of CSIRO's Dr Mark Tizard, who has created a new microRNA catalogue for the humble chook.

Biofuels - North America and India are into it in a big way, Brazil wants everyone to play, and China is spending a packet to join in. Now a group of Queensland biotechnologists have teamed up with the Swiss to sweeten the game.

With the lifting of two moratoria on genetically modified crops in Australia recently, so did the inevitably polarised debate take off. Those for and against are unlikely to change their minds and, unfortunately, some scientists are now afraid to speak theirs.

Salvador, Warts, Hippo and Yorkie are an eclectically named group of genes that form the core components of a signalling pathway in Drosophila that regulates control of organ size and may have some important parallels with human cancer.

Who would have thought that Chinese vegies, phosphopeptides and stressed mitochondria might advance the treatment of type 2 diabetes?

Model organisms such as zebrafish are vitally important in answering basic questions of developmental cell biology and signalling, and those built for distance and not speed may just have a few more prickles.

ALS previews the Hunter Cellular Biology Meeting, which starts tomorrow.

Peter Klinken and his team are studying key decision makers in blood cell differentiation and leukaemia.

After becoming an epigenetics convert four years ago at Lorne and winning the Eppendorf Young Investigator's Award there two years ago, Dr Jeff Craig returns to Lorne in 2008 as an invited speaker to present the fruits of his conversion.

Frances Shannon tells the Lorne protein conference about the role of architectural proteins and how the packaging of DNA in the cell nucleus controls immune-related gene expression.