Life Science

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 recently published sequencing data on breast and colorectal tumors brought up lots of questions about the validity of the cancer genome project. A few letters to the editor of Science about this data bring up the argument that the cancer genome project may not be the best fiscal decision in the current funding environment. How much should be spent to find a few more genes that are mutated in cancer? The authors of the original publication also give a concise response.
Is the cancer genome project a good idea?

A nice, and brief, commentary about the history of eggs in biomedical research. It also discusses the future prospects from a new article about transgenic chickens.

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.

This is great news. While the decline in cancer deaths from 2002 to 2003 was only in the hundreds, the difference between 2003 and 2004 was 10 times that. While this is exciting, the real question is whether or not this will continue and what we can do to help.

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.

This is a NY Times article reporting on the results of a study presented at the San Antonio breast cancer conference. They analyzed the recent findings of the NCI that breast cancer incidence was down 7% in 2003. That is the first decline in decades. Their epidemiology links the decrease to the massive decrease in hormone replacement therapy (HRT) that began in 2003 after it was suggested to increase breast cancer risk. The article also discusses an recent paper in JCO that revealed an even bigger decrease in breast cancer incidence in California. The link is also made that affluent women were