Steering aid

The primary cilium serves as a “cellular GPS” in wound repair and beyond

Soren Tvorup Christensen
University of Copenhagen


If cells held high school reunions, the primary cilium would be the class nerd who comes back in glory as a bioscience millionaire. Once written off as a vestigial organelle left in the evolutionary dust, the primary cilium has in the last decade risen to prominence as a vital cellular sensor at the root of everything from polycystic kidney disease to cancer to left–right anatomical abnormalities. Now comes evidence that the primary cilium may act as a “cellular GPS,” orienting cells that play a critical role in wound healing to move in the right direction.

TO READ MORE, GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Christensen.pdf

Exploiting a cancer’s addiction

Researchers may have found a new way to slam the brakes on deadly ovarian cancer

Tulsiram Prathapam
University of California, Berkeley

Ovarian cancer cells are “addicted” to a family of proteins produced by a notorious oncogene, MYC, say cell biology researchers at the University of California, Berkeley. Blocking these oncoproteins shuts down cell proliferation in the deadliest cancer of the female reproductive system. On the basis of work in cultured human ovarian cancer cells, Tulsiram Prathapam, G. Steven Martin, and colleagues believe that their success with Myc protein inhibition could open a new therapeutic approach to a gynecological cancer that has lagged substantially behind treatment advances for other types.
TO READ MORE, GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Prathapam.pdf

Resolving the blind spot

Seeing the unseen with super-resolution fluorescence microscopy

Bo Huang
Harvard University

On the cellular scale, life gets interesting below 200–300 nm. That’s the length scale of most intracellular structures and the level at which the cell carries out most of its work. Unfortunately, it’s a blind spot for conventional light microscopes. Even when using fluorescent-tagged molecules, light microscopes cannot resolve two objects closer than half the wavelength of the light because of the phenomenon called diffraction. Their images look blurry and overlap no matter how high the magnification. This resolution limit is like the fat man wearing a tall hat in the movie seat in front of you. He’s blocking the best part of the picture. Now comes a new “super-resolution” fluorescence microscopy technique that may at least get the fat man to remove his hat.
TO READ MORE, GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Huang.pdf

A small tumor is a large place

Throwing a “photoswitch” on cancer cells lights up the microenvironment and shows how tumor cells are guided toward a blood vessel

Bojana Gligorijevic
Albert Einstein College of Medicine
The Bronx

Small tumors are like minor surgery: If it’s your surgery, it’s not minor. If it’s your tumor, it’s not small. But increasingly, biologists are discovering that even a small tumor can be a large place and that a cell’s location⎯its microenvironment⎯within a tumor can decide its fate. That’s because cells are always signaling to each other, and figuring out what individual tumor cells are saying could tell researchers how to break up the cancer conversation.
TO READ MORE, GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Gilgorijevic.pdf

Lipids and longevity

Yeast yield secrets of old age: Eat less and process lipids well when young

Vladimir Titorenko
Concordia University, Montreal

After leavening bread and brewing beer, the third most interesting use of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae may be in laboratories studying the age-old question, what is old age? Is old age the final stage of a developmental program or merely the result of a lifelong accumulation of unrepaired cellular and molecular damage? Studying baker's yeast as a model for the mechanism of cellular aging, Vladimir Titorenko of Concordia University in Montreal sees aging as a little of both.

TO READ MORE, GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Titorenko.pdf

From geobiology to cystic fibrosis

Probing the evolutionary roots of ancient bacteria may open a new line of attack on the leading cause of death in cystic fibrosis: opportunistic infection

Lars Dietrich
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The agony and the ecstasy of basic research is that wherever you begin, you never know where you’ll end up. Consider the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory of geobiologist Dianne K. Newman, which focuses on how ancestral bacteria on the early earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals. What might seem a purely academic question led Newman and postdoctoral fellow Lars Dietrich to new insights into the leading cause of death among the 30,000 Americans with cystic fibrosis (CF). TO READ MORE GO TO:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Dietrich.pdf

The virus beneath the skin

Genital tissue no foolproof barrier to sexual transmission of human immunodeficiency virus
Thomas Hope
Department of Cell and Molecular Biology
Northwestern University Medical School

The rise of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmission through heterosexual sex has researchers scrambling for new vaccines and microbicides to block its spread, but findings by researchers at the Northwestern University School of Medicine in Chicago challenge a widely held assumption that the normal mucosal lining of the female genital tract is an effective barrier to viral penetration. TO READ MORE....Go to:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Hope.pdf

Celldance, the URL

ASCB's ever popular cell biology film and still contest has posted the winning entries at this URL:
http://tinyurl.com/6aj4zu

Watch. Admire. Download.

Tuesday in SF: Science on the March

A few years back and in the office of a newspaper that shall remain nameless, the managing editor told me that he had no need on his staff for a science reporter because his readers "had more important things to read about." This conversation took place in a large American city with a major research university including a medical school, a children's hospital with a large research arm, and a Fortune 500 consumer products company engaged in significant basic R&D enterprise. Throw in hospitals, engineering firms, several undergraduate colleges, companies dealing in chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and high tech of various varieties. Science clearly was of little importance to his readers.

Of course, the newspaper industry is dying while science, even in these rough economic times, is holding its own. This came to me this morning as I found myself in a phalanx of scientists, bristling with poster tubes, marching in the rain toward the Moscone Center where we split up into biologists and geophysicists. As I mentioned early in this blog, there are roughly 25,000 scientists, students and associates at these two meetings here.

Maybe someone should organize a million scientists (and engineers) march on Washington.

Monday's child is full of bioinformatics

The old joke is that biologists were the kids who good in science couldn't do the math. That's the old biology. Math and biology are melting together to form a new science of bioinformatics. The cause is data. Biology was being flooded by data. Bioinformatics has emerged to sort it out in new ways.

The work presented at the Monday "Ten AM Press Briefing" by Han-Yu Chuang from the Bioinformatics Program at the University of California, San Diego, demonstrated how data can be stood on its head, flipped over, and recombined with other data. Her audacious goal was to make predictions on whether or not a particular tumor sample was like to metastasize based on computational analysis of overlapping patterns of signaling pathways and protein complexes. It was "dry lab" biology on a large number-crunching scale. And it seems to offer an entirely new way to look at cancer as "a disease of pathways," says Chuang.

To read the whole story, go to:
https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Ideker.pdf

Stem cells: the owner's manual

Depending on who you are listening to, the U.S. is on the verge of an explosion in stem cell research of all types as the new administration in Washington is likely to repeal President Bush's strict limits on federal funding for embryonic stem cells. Or not. If the future of stem cell research is considered unlimited, the present state of knowledge has been hampered by our imperfect knowledge of "stemness," the defining quality that makes a cell capable of renewing itself over a lifetime while still churning out specialized progenitor cells.

The continuing difficulties and our growing skill at finding, defining, and manipulating "adult" stem cells can be seen in work on adult muscle stem cells presented by Alessandra Sacco of Stanford on Sunday.

To read the full story, go to:
https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Sacco.pdf

Upstream, downstream: Amy Tang, Mayo Clinic School of Medicine

Cell biologists can mix and mangle metaphors with the best of them. When they talk about "upstream" and "downstream," it's not rivers they have in mind by cell signaling "pathways." In my hiking days, I never remember setting off "upstream" on a trail unless it was raining extremely hard. Yet in a cell signaling pathway, upstream is cause. Downstream is effect. The usual approach to blocking an unfortunate downstream outcome like cancer is to go upstream as far as possible to dam the source. The problem is that signaling pathways are not always linear. If they are rivers, they end like the Mississippi in a vast delta of outcomes. Perhaps major signaling pathways are more like railroads that rivers. Because you get on the train in Minneapolis doesn't mean you're getting off in New Orleans.

Not to torture these poor metaphors any further but Amy Tang, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic College of Minnesota, who presented here at ASCB on Sunday suggested to me that signaling pathways are more like hub airports than railroad stations. Once a signal flies in on Pathway Airlines, there are many places it could fly to next. For this reason, Tang's work on highly aggressive pancreatic has looked "downstream" in the RAS pathway, a pathway often associated with cancer. Her aim is to block only those RAS signals/flights connecting for a cancer final destination. Canceling only those flights would be much more effective in her strategy.

Tang's results in stopping pancreatic cancer in tissue cell culture by blocking one of the RAS pathway's downstream components, the ubiquitin ligase SIAH, were nothing short of astonishing, she told the journalists on hand. The full story can be read by following this link:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Tang.pdf

The Flies Have It

The fruit fly had its 15 minutes of fame during this year's presidential campaign when fruit fly research was singled out for special scorn. The charge that fruit fly research was irrelevant and a waste of taxpayer money left most biologists (as well as fruit growers) slack jawed. Why do you start to sing the praises of Drosophila melanogaster? For starters, you could mention that Drosophila had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine at least four times. This fly was painted by Edith M. Wallace in 1919 for fruit fly geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan who won Drosophila's first Nobel in 1933. 

On Sunday at the ASCB meeting, Mimi Shirasu-Hiza of Stanford University laid out another new "fly" frontier--the intriguing connection between circadian rhythm and innate immunity.

To read and/or download this story from our "Novel & Newsworthy" section of "Cell Biology 2008" go to:

https://www.ascb.org/ascbsec/press/embargo/ASCB-pressbook08_Shirasu-Hiza.pdf

A moveable feast

The ASCB Annual Meeting follows a peculiar calendar all its own. We always meet in December between Thanksgiving and Christmas when hotel rooms and convention halls are cheaper. But we are at the mercy of the Great Turkey and FDR’s long ago edict that Thanksgiving would be the fourth Thursday in November. Thus the ASCB can start as early as December 7th (which we did in 2007 in Washington DC) and end as late as December 17, which is awfully close to Christmas. That’s the case this year. Ho, ho, bio.

The ASCB Meeting also spins around its own axis like the great astronomer Ptolemy’s nested series of celestial globes. We always start on Saturday but there are no posters and few presentations on Saturday. The keynote is a big draw on Saturday evening but Sunday is the first “real” day of the meeting with posters up, the Exhibit Hall open, and talks, talks, talks, and more talks.

It’s also when the Public Information Committee holds its first “Ten AM Press Briefing.” The PIC (a.k.a. The Pick) puts out a “press book” as a guide to the meeting for science journalists. The ASCB meeting is all about presenting papers. This year, members submitted 3,451 abstracts (scientific talk for the boiled-down versions, which are a sort of a “coming attraction.”) Of these, 1,043 authors asked that their papers be considered for “platform presentation,” which means the author thought highly enough of the data that he/she thought it might qualify for a spot on a mini-symposium panel. Only a fraction of the 1,043 will actually get a slot on a panel but the PIC uses that as a marker for the author's good opinion of the paper. 

We form screening panels—five this year⎯to blast through all 1,043. This year every abstract passed before five sets of human eyeballs. Then we ranked our choices, winnowing that down to 150. We screened, voted, and ranked again. We ended up with 11 top picks which we call “Novel & Newsworthy,” meaning that in our humble and rushed opinion, these are the most interesting, most newsworthy, and coolest papers at the Meeting. This doesn’t mean that ASCB is endorsing these abstracts, only that we think these are worth looking at more closely.

I will be blogging each day’s Ten AM Press Briefing, reporting on some of what was said at the press conference and posting the relevant press book “story” from “Cell Biology 2008.” The stories are “embargoed” against publication, meaning that reporters are given early access to the stories, abstracts, and background material but can’t publish, broadcast or web post anything until the day the authors present. So today we will have the Sunday abstracts.

Sunday morning penance: small correction

The Moscone Centeer is indeed a vast place. ASCB is in Moscone South but in last night's blog I said that the American Geophysical Union (AGU) would be across the street in the other "half" of the Moscone. Apparently AGU will be in the Moscone West which is technically "across the street" if you cut across catty-corner. Accuracy, however, requires this correction. Also I've always wanted to use the word, "catty-corner," in a science context. I offer it up as a possible name for a Drosophila gene. Readers are invited to submit a possible phenotype for catty-corner.

Saturday morning, Saturday evening.

The fly-casters are back. Walking to my first ASCB Annual Meeting in 2000, I noticed all these other people confidently striding toward the convention center with what looked to be fishing rod cases strapped to their shoulders. Was there another meeting at the center for fly fishing enthusiasts? I soon discovered that the tubes contained tightly-rolled posters, not fishing tackle. 

This morning, the anglers/scientists were back on Howard Street in San Francisco, heading for the trout streams of cell biology that will flow through the cavernous Moscone Center for the next five days. Across the street in the other half of the Moscone, the American Geophysical Union will open its fall meeting on Monday. I wonder if I'll be able to spot the geologists by the rock hammers hanging from their belts. The ASCB is a Big Meeting. ASCB is expecting 10,000 attendees--scientists, students, press, exhibitors, and assorted dignitaries. But we're dwarfed the the AGU which routinely draws 15,000 to its fall meeting. 

Interestingly enough, geophysics and biology are drawing closer together as the effect of life on Earth and vice versa becomes more critical. One of the intriguing papers at ASCB is from Dianne K. Newman's "geobiology" lab at MIT. Her lab is focused on how ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals. What might have seemed a purely academic question has led Newman and Lars Dietrich, a postdoctoral fellow in her lab, to new insights into the opportunistic infection that is the leading cause of death among the 30,000 Americans with cystic fibrosis. Dietrich will be presenting on Tuesday, so check back for more details on how genes can have different "purposes" in different organisms. Science aside, Dietrich has taken some striking images of bacterial colonies of Pseudomonas aeruginosa that he has been disrupting by gene silencing. More on those later. 

I type from the bowels of the Moscone Center where messengers come in from the outside to tell me how cold it is on the street. Well, cold by San Francisco standards. Soon I will go up the Moscone escalators to the vibrant streets of downtown San Francisco. How many American cities still have crowds of Christmas shoppers packing the downtown streets after dark? Recession or no, people here are shopping. 

Walking back to my hotel in the cold dark, I will have to push through the excited crowds outside the FAO Schwartz displays. Union Square is festooned with lights. A temporary skating rink in the park offers the intoxicating mix of ice and hot chocolate. Walking, I will think of lost cities and ghosts of Decembers past. Geologists, biologists, and window gazers, we've all come to SF for new wonders. 

Like a blog needs a bicycle

Friday, December 5, 2008

Like a blog needs a bicycle

We are a week away from the start of the ASCB Annual Meeting in SF for which I am supposed to produce a Cell Bio Blog. I've been wondering if I could volunteer for root canal work instead. I've never blogged and the very idea of it is unnerving. Where do I begin? Where does it all end?  

This morning, the NY Times reports the death of "HM," the legendary amnesiac studied for decades by Canadian psychologist Brenda Milner. HM, whose name the Times now reveals was Henry Moliason, died in a Connecticut nursing home on Tuesday night, aged 82. HM sustained brain trauma in a childhood bicycle accident. By the time he was in his mid-20s, HM was having blackouts and uncontrolled convulsions. Unable to work, HM sought out surgical help for these debilitating seizures. This was in the early 1950s. The neurosurgeon decided to ablate two narrow strips on the underside of his brain, transversing HM's hippocampus. It left him with a working memory about 30 seconds long. After that, everything and everyone was new to HM. The operation wasn't quackery. It reflected our primitive knowledge of how the brain was organized and how it functioned 60 years ago. Today the idea that any reputable surgeon would cut into the hippocampus is shocking. We know so much more, right?

But to get back to HM: from his misfortune, Dr. Milner was able to lay the basis for the modern study of memory. In those pre-MRI days, Dr. Milner used simple games and tests to probe the shape of HM's radically reordered mind. From her studies, she derived the notion of two kinds of memory. There is declarative memory by which we record names, faces, and new events and there is motor learning by which we learn new physical skills like shooting a basketball or riding a bike. Under Milner's watchful eye, HM was able to acquire new physical motor skills. He learned to retrace a pattern on paper while looking at his hand's movement only in a mirror. This is a difficult skill and HM got better and better at it every time he sat down to try it. Yet he had no memory of the test. The skill struck him as completely novel every time he attempted it. He had no declarative memory of the task and yet his motor learning grew sharper and sharper. In fact, HM had no declarative memory of Dr. Milner. Thirty seconds after she left the room, she vanished. Every time she returned, Dr. Milner was a novel face to HM.

So how does this apply to blogging? I've never blogged. Yet I've been writing on paper and on screens for decades, most recently as the Science Writer for the ASCB. So will blogging be a declarative experience or will I just pop up the kickstand and peddle away? You are invited to watch me. I might wobble off to destruction or slip quickly into old habits on a new machine as I blog from the 48th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology. I find ASCB meetings to be equally enthralling and mind flattening. So much exciting new science, so many boring PPT slides. The idea of this blog is to point out some of the former and skip the later. 

I must also confess that my perspective at these meetings is different from that of the scientist members of the ASCB.  I'm a science writer and not a scientist. I go to a different meeting as it were. Hopefully, you can ride along with me. 

Meantime, I've got on my bicycle helmet, my pants clips, and my day-glow safety vest. SF or bust. One convention center, 6,000 cell biologists, and one brand new blogger.