August 13, 2010 - Some good pieces of advice on how to prepare an oral presentation, liberally taken from the net. Perhaps some of our students, past and present, may get interested in following point #5 more often.

August 11, 2010 - The evaluation of CIBERDEM by external reviewers has concluded  and our group certainly received accolades such as "very competitive, established expertise and excellent track record", "very good productivity in numbers and quality", or "topic of research timely and highly interesting". We dedicate this entry to the usual lurkers with all our affection. By the way, here is the 2009 Annual Report (our part).

July 26, 2010 - Everybody knows what genomics or proteomics is but, frustrating as it may be, not everybody knows what lipidomics is or, better, what lipidomics is good for. Hence review articles like this one by Shevchenko & Simons are always welcome, if only for the very high audience it targets.

July 13, 2010 - Somebody once said that the important things in life are very few (entire quote to appear here shortly). Science may or may not be one of them, but certainly, winning the World Cup tops the list. No time for losers 'cause we are the champions - of the world!!!

June 21, 2010 - We welcome Julio Rubio as a new member of the Eicosanoid Research Division. Julio is a CIBERDEM postdoctoral fellow.

June 15, 2010 - "He who is born a square will not die a circle". (Gennaro Gattuso, Italian fantasista). Summer 2010 group meeting schedule here.

June 9, 2010 - Olimpio Montero, colleague, friend, and mass spec companion, has left the IBGM  and hence, the Eicosanoid Research Division. Better times await him in his new destination, and that is good. He will be much missed.

June 7, 2010 - The Third European Workshop on Lipid Mediators was a resounding success, with over 200 attendees, nice atmosphere, outstanding venue and excellent scientific content.. A picture gallery has been added to the workshop's website.

May 21, 2010 - We welcome graduate student Carlos Guijas as a new member of the Eicosanoid Research Division.

May 18, 2010 - Unrelated to science, we have just learned that Ronnie James Dio passed away on May 16. Only a few months ago we had been so amused at discovering a Dio poster in the lab of a very recent former president of the Spanish National Research Council. Following Dio's advice, we will not talk to strangers who are there to do us harm.

May 3, 2010 - "A weak institute in terms of quality and scientific output"; "a coherent and integrated research program does not exist"... Nice comments directly taken from the Spanish National Research Council's Action Plan for 2010-1013, Biology & Biomedicine Section, page 13, last paragraph. Nothing to worry about though, no one is going to do anything.

April 30, 2010 - Our student David Balgoma has just left the building for the whiter pastures (...) of Stockholm, the Karolinska Institute, to pursue postdoctoral training in lipidomics. We wish him luck and success.

April 27, 2010 - The Third European Workshop on Lipid Mediators is right there around the corner.  Final program here.

March 27, 2010 - It is half-amusing half-flattering to receive proposals from time to time to insert commercial ads in our website. For obvious reasons we do not sell advertising space (and, for the same obvious reasons, our site's URL does not end in dot-com - the latter not that obvious for some).

March 25, 2010 - "Miserable Castile, yesterday the dominating one, wrapped in her rags scorns all she does not know" (Antonio Machado, Spanish poet). Spring 2010 group meeting schedule here.

March 9, 2010 - We recently learned of the existence of something called CAMAG TLC-MS Interface. Nowadays the sciences advance at barbaric rates (that's a Spanish joke).

February 20, 2010 - A necessary warning to bold navigators. It was not us who sank the idea of a dedicated lipidomics facility for the IBGM. Those who really know us, please do not be misled by the usual mermaid chants.

January 14, 2010 - The article that we have distinguished as Paper of the Year 2009 was published in the Feb 17 issue of PNAS (106: 2136–2141). In this article, Ejsing et al. reported the use of a shotgun lipidomics approach to study the lipidome of the yeast S. cerevisiae. They identified and quantified 250 unique molecular species, belonging to 21 different lipid classes under various growth conditions. This is quite an achievement, not only from a technical perspective, but also from a cell regulation context. As pointed out in a commentary that accompanied the paper (PNAS 106: 2089-2090), genes and transcripts do not always predict the precise levels of active proteins/enzymes, and knowledge of the actual lipid metabolite levels is more predictive of metabolic implications.

January 13, 2010 - The local newspaper El Norte de Castilla informed its readers a couple of days ago that, according to some sources, the University of Valladolid currently ranks 1,332 out of 2,000 centers in scientific productivity in Spain. Although none of our business, if true, this news is disturbing.

January 8, 2010 - "After changes upon changes, we are more or less the same" (Paul Simon, American songwriter). Winter 2010 group meeting schedule here.