Journal Article

This cool paper shows cell-to-cell transmission of retroviruses in living cells for the first time, and they have cool movies to prove it. Even if you don't read the paper or care about retroviruses, check out the great movies in the supplemental materials.

This paper in the latest issue of Cancer Cell describes the interplay of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and p38. They do some nice experiments showing this interaction, but they jump around between different cell types. I am working on something related to this work and metabolism, so I thought I would pass this article along.

This is a nice detailed review about epithelial stem cells (including skin, breast and others) from Elaine Fuchs lab. This will be a nice resource to find epithelial-specific stem cell infromation without needing to filter out embryonic or hematopoetic stem cell information.

This paper makes a functional link between Gadd45a and "active demethylation". I am still going through the paper but I'd be interested to know what other people think about this paper. Is DNA repair really the sought after DNA demethylase?

The current issue of Science has a few News articles about the proposed US science budget for 2008.

This paper investigates the p53 status of Retinoblastoma tumors. They find that MDM4, the ubiquitin-ligase for p53, is amplified in Retinoblastoma tumors. Amplification of MDM4 allows the cells to maintain a wild-type p53 sequence but functionally inactivates p53. This method of inactivation of p53 function has been observed in other tumor types, but this paper proposes that the inactivation of Rb may select for inactivation of MDM4. This was presented at the UCSF BMS Journal Club on 1-18-07.

This short paper accompanied a larger metagenomics paper in the same issue of Nature. An interesting correlation is shown between types of microorganisms in the colon and dieting. Presented at UCSF BMS Journal Club 1-18-06.

This paper attempts to link obesity with the normal flora of the colon. It raises some interesting points and ideas for future directions. What if we could treat obesity with antibiotics? That would be a major breakthrough. Another paper from the same group makes this link in humans as well. The question of cause vs. consequence is still up for debate. Presented for UCSF BMS Journal Club 1-18-06.

Scientists from Wake Forest and Harvard say they have isolated a new type of stem cell from amniotic fluid surrounding the fetus and from the placenta, a discovery they believe could someday provide a ready means of repairing or replacing diseased organs in patients.

This is a recent paper from the Dec. issue of Cancer Cell from the greater breast cancer array community at UCSF and LBNL. I haven't read the whole paper very well to comment much on it's overall conclusions, but Figure 1 is worth it's weight in gold for anyone who works with breast cancer cell lines. It has ER/PR status, p53 status, etc. for 51 breast tumor cell lines and huge amounts of expression data. This paper should be a great resource for anyone looking for positive or negative control samples as well.