Posts

March 15, 2013

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5:26 PM | Is it 'Important' or is it 'valuable'?

We've recently discussed dopamine as a reward prediction signal. But that is really just the start of the complicated dopamine story. Dopamine's role in reward and punishment (by the hiking artist)Some research groups have also found that dopamine neurons respond to aversive stimuli, like an air puff to the face or an electric shock. This finding seems to be be completely incompatible with the idea that dopamine is a signal for reward. Luckily some scientists took the time to try to resolve […]

Bromberg-Martin ES, Matsumoto M & Hikosaka O (2010). Dopamine in motivational control: rewarding, aversive, and alerting., Neuron, 68 (5) 815-34. PMID: 21144997

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March 14, 2013

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8:14 PM | The π-Day Challenge

Charles Darwin's birthday is fine for a serious celebration, but can cell biologists come up with something with the popular if geeky charm of π-Day? March 14 has now become established as π-Day, that is 3.14, at least in the American way of writing the date. (It is never π-Day in Europe, for example, where it’s merely 14 March. Sorry.) The spread of π-Day is largely the work of physics and math teachers who took a mathematical pun and ran with it. Biologists can only […]

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8:14 PM | Our People: Dan Kiehart, New Dean of Natural Science for Duke’s Liberal Arts School

Dan Kiehart In July, Dan Kiehart, chair of the Biology Department at Duke University, will become the dean of the Natural Sciences Division within Trinity College of Arts & Sciences, Duke’s undergraduate liberal arts school. Kiehart, a Society member since 1980, currently serves on the ASCB Council.

March 13, 2013

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3:44 PM | Sequestration: The NIH Bookmark You Need Now

Sally Rockey If you are among those in the scientific world whose heart goes pitty-pat whenever you see an NIH address in your inbox or in the upper left hand corner of an envelope, you might want to add this bookmark to your browser. It’s where NIH will announce the gruesome details of how it will carry out the long threatened federal budget sequestration. Actually you should have this as an all-weather bookmark as it’s the "Rock Talk" blog of Sally Rockey, Deputy […]

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1:16 PM | BioTime: A new Geron, without a decade of baggage

Avid watchers of the stem cell and regenerative medicine market have no doubt heard of Geron selling its stem cell assets to BioTime. Nature covered it in some detail last month, and the transaction itself follows a Letter of Intent announced last November, which valued it at approximately $71 million. The transaction leaves Geron to...Read more

March 12, 2013

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1:55 PM | Should reviewers be required to cite their sources?

When I got back from the IBAGS conference, I was greeted by an 'paper rejection email'.Failure with a capital F (source)I was disappointed of course, but I slept off my jetlag and then built my self-confidence back up by saving the universe. I will retool the paper and submit it somewhere else.However, the reviews for this paper were particularly infuriating (aren't they always?). Here's a summary:I say: "Thing X is true (citation, citation), so we did thing Y which uses thing X."Reviewer says: […]

March 11, 2013

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5:49 PM | Bromodomain Inhibitors – an exciting new target in cancer research?

One of the interesting things about basic cancer research is that new targets emerge all the time, offering fresh opportunities…

Filippakopoulos, P., Qi, J., Picaud, S., Shen, Y., Smith, W., Fedorov, O., Morse, E., Keates, T., Hickman, T., Felletar, I. & Philpott, M. (2010). Selective inhibition of BET bromodomains, Nature, 468 (7327) 1067-1073. DOI: 10.1038/nature09504

Puissant, A., Frumm, S., Alexe, G., Bassil, C., Qi, J., Chanthery, Y., Nekritz, E., Zeid, R., Gustafson, W., Greninger, P. & Garnett, M. (2013). Targeting MYCN in Neuroblastoma by BET Bromodomain Inhibition, Cancer Discovery, 3 (3) 308-323. DOI: 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-12-0418

Lin, C., Lovén, J., Rahl, P., Paranal, R., Burge, C., Bradner, J., Lee, T. & Young, R. (2012). Transcriptional Amplification in Tumor Cells with Elevated c-Myc, Cell, 151 (1) 56-67. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.08.026

Mertz, J., Conery, A., Bryant, B., Sandy, P., Balasubramanian, S., Mele, D., Bergeron, L. & Sims, R. (2011). Targeting MYC dependence in cancer by inhibiting BET bromodomains, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108 (40) 16669-16674. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1108190108

Schnepp, R. & Maris, J. (2013). Targeting MYCN: A Good BET for Improving Neuroblastoma Therapy?, Cancer Discovery, 3 (3) 255-257. DOI: 10.1158/2159-8290.CD-13-0018

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March 09, 2013

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9:07 PM | Dopamine and Reward Prediction Error

I am back from the IBAGS conference and full of new information! I plan to blog about tons of amazing things over the next month or so, but today we'll start with some foundation building.Dopamine nails (source)The IBAGS (international basal ganglia society) meeting is all about the basal ganglia (which includes the striatum), and as you may know, dopamine is a super important molecule for the proper function of the striatum (it is the dopamine cells that die in Parkinson's Disease).There were […]

Schultz W (1998). Predictive reward signal of dopamine neurons., Journal of neurophysiology, 80 (1) 1-27. PMID: 9658025

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March 08, 2013

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1:28 PM | Ivory DNA sequencing tracks elephant poaching hotspots

The illicit trade in elephant ivory has been a ridiculous problem since the 1980′s, when Asian and African elephants were decimated to such a level that they made it onto Appendix One (“most endangered species”) of CITES. While all trade … Continue reading →

Wasser SK, Shedlock AM, Comstock K, Ostrander EA, Mutayoba B & Stephens M (2004). Assigning African elephant DNA to geographic region of origin: applications to the ivory trade., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 101 (41) 14847-52. PMID: 15459317

Wasser SK, Mailand C, Booth R, Mutayoba B, Kisamo E, Clark B & Stephens M (2007). Using DNA to track the origin of the largest ivory seizure since the 1989 trade ban., Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104 (10) 4228-33. PMID: 17360505

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March 07, 2013

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8:45 PM | cri de cure

That PhD glut people keep talking about? Turns out it’s bigger than we thought. 1 in 10 Americans have a...

March 05, 2013

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3:06 PM | How many facilities? Centralized vs. decentralized manufacture

When it comes to the cell therapy commercialization crunch there are some fundamental questions that need to be answered. Is your product going to be frozen or fresh? How will the product be administered? What is your dosing strategy? And the one that I’m going to focus on in this blog: Will your manufacturing strategy...Read more

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6:07 AM | Crowd4Discovery update: February 2013

Last time I checked in with an update at the end of January, the Crowd4Discovery/C4D project was still booting up...

March 04, 2013

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7:58 PM | Honoring a Legend

The Cellular Scale is at the International Basal Ganglia Society meeting this week (#IBAGS2013), and finally has internet!Sunrise over the Gulf of Aqaba (I took this picture)It's already been two days of conferencing, and I plan to mainly write some follow up posts when I get back. But I will just briefly mention the "Lifetime Member" lecture that was given on the first evening of the conference. Mahlon Delong (source)This year's lifetime member is Mahlon DeLong.I've written before about deep […]

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5:34 PM | Comment on In which we endure by Richard Wintle

I am also reminded of two related things: 1) One lab I worked in was warm enough that another (senior, wisecracking) student used to say "37 degrees. Body temperature, nice and comfortable." 2) At a mouse genetics conference I once attended, one of the speakers noted that the animals he used in his experiments were well cared for, with regulated and predictable temperature and humidity, plentiful food and clean water, filtered clean air, and predictable light and dark cycles - none […]

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4:46 PM | Curating Science

Here is an excerpt from an essay that I recently wrote for 3quarksdaily and I wanted to post it here because I think that the discussion also applies to "curating" scientific information. Curating Creativity "For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency." Jorge Luis Borges, "Library of Babel" The British-Australian art curator Nick Waterlow was tragically murdered on November 9, 2009 in […]

March 03, 2013

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5:03 PM | Comment on In which we endure by Austin Elliott

I did my PhD in a lab (at UCL, on the main site) that worked on muscle metabolism in frog muscle, so I recall the boss dissecting frog muscles out in a 4oC cold room. There was an older paper from the same lab (from the very early 70s) featuring measurements of metabolic changes in muscle across a range of temperatures from 0 deg C to 30 deg C. I was told that the person who did the zero deg C work was an American visitor (later a well-known Professor) who did the experiments over a cold […]

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3:34 PM | Comment on In which we endure by Richard Wintle

You might think that your occupational health and safety bods would be more concerned about poor working conditions (14C in winter? 40C in summer) than wooly hats and gloves. But that would make sense of course, and as we all know, Occ H&S rarely does. You might also get them working on screens for the windows - really to keep the pigeons out, but you can use the reasoning that it will prevent graduate students from falling to their deaths, or undergraduates from spilling dangerous […]

March 02, 2013

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8:37 PM | Conference Time

I am at the international Basal Ganglia society meeting this week. I will probably blog about some of the great new research that I learn about, but not for a week. The internet here is pay-for and buggy, and all my blogger information is all suddenly in Hebrew (I am actually typing this right to left for some reason). So I'll be away from twitter and blogger for about a week. But I'll have tons of cool stuff to write about after that .The Cellular Scale

March 01, 2013

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2:50 PM | ASH 2012 update on ARRY-520 in multiple myeloma

After highlighting the interesting biomarker program associated with AVEO’s tivozanib in renal cell and triple negative breast cancers in the last…

Garon, E., Finn, R., Hosmer, W., Dering, J., Ginther, C., Adhami, S., Kamranpour, N., Pitts, S., Desai, A., Elashoff, D. & French, T. (2010). Identification of Common Predictive Markers of In vitro Response to the Mek Inhibitor Selumetinib (AZD6244; ARRY-142886) in Human Breast Cancer and Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer Cell Lines, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, 9 (7) 1985-1994. DOI: 10.1158/1535-7163.MCT-10-0037

Sarli, V. & Giannis, A. (2008). Targeting the Kinesin Spindle Protein: Basic Principles and Clinical Implications, Clinical Cancer Research, 14 (23) 7583-7587. DOI: 10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-08-0120

Tunquist, B., Woessner, R. & Walker, D. (2010). Mcl-1 Stability Determines Mitotic Cell Fate of Human Multiple Myeloma Tumor Cells Treated with the Kinesin Spindle Protein Inhibitor ARRY-520, Molecular Cancer Therapeutics, 9 (7) 2046-2056. DOI: 10.1158/1535-7163.MCT-10-0033

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February 28, 2013

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6:16 AM | Rare Disease Day 2013: cystic fibrosis

Last week I shared two of the many slide decks I created for the sophomore Integrated Sciences biology course (ISC235/236),...

February 27, 2013

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11:30 PM | The Open Access Debate Continues

The New England Journal of Medicine has just published four articles that comment on the issue of "open access". I will list these four articles and briefly comment on the two papers which are critical of open access publishing. 1. The Downside of Open-Access Publishing by Charlotte Haug This article discusses potential problems associated with open access publishing but also conflates the issue of open access with the issue of inadequate peer review, as can be seen in this excerpt: Of […]

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2:48 PM | GABA, how exciting!

I would like to thank my good friend Anonymous for asking me a great question on a previous post. Anonymous asks: "Are there any known transmitters in the NS that activate both inhibitory receptor subtypes AND excitatory receptor subtypes? Or does every known transmitter activate EITHER a bunch of excitatory subtypes OR a bunch of inhibitory subtypes?" (btw. This doesn't qualify as a LMAYQ post because it's a real true question that someone directly asked, not a search term)While I […]

Chiang PH, Wu PY, Kuo TW, Liu YC, Chan CF, Chien TC, Cheng JK, Huang YY, Chiu CD & Lien CC & (2012). GABA is depolarizing in hippocampal dentate granule cells of the adolescent and adult rats., The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 32 (1) 62-7. PMID: 22219270

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2:34 PM | Ted-Ed membrane lesson

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1:28 PM | Supporting Miss. Muffet in the sixth millenium BC

I love cheese. Oh, how I do. Hard cheese, soft cheese, hole-y cheese, crumbly cheese, squidgy cheese – all of them will find a warm and welcoming home in my mouth. While deliciousness alone seals the place of cheese at … Continue reading →

Salque M, Bogucki PI, Pyzel J, Sobkowiak-Tabaka I, Grygiel R, Szmyt M & Evershed RP (2013). Earliest evidence for cheese making in the sixth millennium BC in northern Europe., Nature, 493 (7433) 522-5. PMID: 23235824

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February 26, 2013

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2:02 PM | Stem cell pseudoscience in the courts?

Patients contemplating medical travel for the purpose of receiving scientifically unproven stem cell treatments may wish to consider one more potential side effect: the possibility of losing their eligibility for health status-related compensation and benefits. In May 2012, a United States appeal court affirmed an earlier New York district court decision to deny disability and...Read more

February 25, 2013

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10:27 PM | Are Scientists Divided Over Divining Rods?

When I read a statement which starts with "Scientists are divided over......", I expect to learn about a scientific controversy involving scientists who offer distinct interpretations or analyses of published scientific data. This is not uncommon in stem cell biology. For example, scientists disagree about the differentiation capacity of adult bone marrow stem cells. Some scientists are convinced that these adult stem cells have a broad differentiation capacity and that a significant proportion […]

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4:46 PM | The human machine: probing the mechanics

The previous post in this series can be found here. This week, inspired by Shaun's most recent post covering exciting new results in cosmology, I have decided to also take a quick look at one of the fascinating recent findings of molecular biology. I hope to give some insight into how this work is done, and why it is not only intellectually interesting, but also potentially practically useful. What do we know? Those of you who have been following this series for a while might […]

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2:38 PM | Will biomarkers revolutionalise treatment with tivozanib?

Following last weeks post on the phase III clinical data for tivozanib in advanced renal cell cancer (RCC), I thought…

February 24, 2013

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6:23 PM | The ENCODE Controversy And Professionalism In Science

The ENCODE (Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements) project received quite a bit of attention when its results were publicized last year. This project involved a very large consortium of scientists with the goal to identify all the functional elements in the human genome. In September 2012, 30 papers were published in a coordinated release and their extraordinary claim was that roughly 80% of the human genome was "functional". This was in direct contrast to the prevailing view among molecular biologists […]

Graur D, Zheng Y, Price N, Azevedo RB, Zufall RA & Elhaik E (2013). On the immortality of television sets: "function" in the human genome according to the evolution-free gospel of ENCODE., Genome biology and evolution, PMID: 23431001

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6:00 PM | Scientizing Art

I've always been fascinated with the way the eye moves around a piece of art. Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" (or as I looked up "that painting of a girl in a field looking at a house")This piece by Andrew Wyeth is an obvious example of an artist completely controlling your gaze. There are pretty much no options here. You look at the girl and then you follow her gaze to the house. You probably then take a quick glance at that other house/barn to the left, and then maybe follow the edge of […]

Massaro D, Savazzi F, Di Dio C, Freedberg D, Gallese V, Gilli G & Marchetti A (2012). When art moves the eyes: a behavioral and eye-tracking study., PloS one, 7 (5) PMID: 22624007

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