Cells synthesize millions of proteins every minute. Three pioneering protein quality control researchers will explain at ASCB 2016 how studying protein folding and misfolding is opening unexpected pathways for treating cancer and neurodegenerative diseases
Cells are often likened to computers, running an operating system that receives signals, processes their input, and responds, according to programming, with cellular output. Yet untangling computer-like pathways in cells is anything but simple, say Denise Montell, professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Aviv Regev, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Broad Institute. However, both are eager to try and will outline their latest efforts at the “Logic of Signaling” symposium at the 2016 ASCB Annual Meeting.
A new study of science PhDs who embarked on careers between 2004 and 2014 showed that while nearly two-thirds chose employment outside academic science, their reasons for doing so had little to do with the advice they received from faculty advisors, other scientific mentors, family, or even graduate school peers.
If you look closely at groups of freshmen science students such as those from underrepresented minority (URM) backgrounds, you can see striking motivational differences across and within these groups. That’s a major finding in a new survey of 249 freshmen by psychology researchers in California.
The problem of persistence has long troubled undergraduate programs hoping to guide students from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups into science careers, but a new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin says that the problem appears to be translating students’ interest into confidence that they can proceed in science.
There is a Merton Bernfield Memorial Award and there was Merton Bernfield, the pediatrician and cell biologist, who knew how to think on his feet. The ASCB’s annual Bernfield award is for outstanding research by a grad student or postdoc. It has a simple application. The winner gets expenses to travel and present at a special minisymposium at the ASCB Annual Meeting. There’s a Bernfield plaque.
Jodi Nunnari was elected by American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) members to serve as ASCB President in 2018. Nunnari, Professor and Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at the University of California, Davis, and Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Cell Biology, will serve as President-Elect on the Executive Committee in 2017.
The American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) has named Erika Shugart, PhD, as its new Executive Director, effective June 1.
When you’re pounding along an icy pavement or sweating through a gym workout, you try to remind yourself of the many health benefits of exercise. Between gasps, you can say that a healthy, fit lifestyle helps prevents obesity, a worldwide problem of increasing magnitude that has been linked to cardiovascular disease and diabetes. But here’s one more—exercise may decrease cancer incidence and slow the growth rate of tumors.
In bloodhounds and neutrophils, getting the scent is not enough. Dogs and immune cells have to remember the chemoattractant they are pursuing, even when it momentarily fades out or threatens to overwhelm.
Brain cancer is not cellular anarchy, says Pedro Lowenstein and colleagues at the University of Michigan and University of Arizona, but highly organized—self-organized. At ASCB 2015, the researchers report that glioma cells build tumors by self-organizing into streams,10-20 cells wide, that obey a mathematically predicted pattern for autonomous agents flowing together. These streams drag along slower gliomas, may block entry of immune cells, and swirl around a central axis containing glioma stem cells that feed the tumor’s growth.
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD )is the third leading cause of death in the US and cigarette smoking is the leading cause of COPD. Currently there is no cure, current treatments are largely palliative, and new treatment targets are scarce. Now Corrine Kliment and colleagues in Doug Robinson’s lab at Johns Hopkins University have found two new targets for blocking cigarette smoke-induced COPD in a surprising place—amoebas. Kliment presents the work at ASCB 2015.
Driven by accelerating advances in super-resolution imaging, fluorescent tagging, and Big Data manipulation, we’re living in the Golden Age of Cell Movies. ASCB’s Celldance Studios today releases three new exciting examples of short (4-6 minute) videos, made by cell scientists themselves who tell their own cell research stories, featuring eye-popping live cell imaging.
To get moving, metastasizing cancer needs to enlist non-cancerous collaborators. Suspicion has fallen on fibroblasts, the cells that secrete and organize the extracellular matrix (ECM), as actively assisting in metastasis. But exactly how these cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) provide aid to the cancer enemy was not known until the discovery by Begum Erdogan and colleagues in Donna Webb’s lab at Vanderbilt University of how CAFs clear a highway through the ECM for migrating cancer cells.
The American Society for Cell Biology has released its first science news press release in graphic format on new research that reveals how metastasizing cancer cells enlist non-cancerous collaborators to rearrange the extracellular matrix into a highway for tumor migration.
Endocytosis is not normal in cancer cells but how dysregulated the process is in cancer cells has just been revealed by Sarah Elkin and colleagues in the University of Texas (UT) Southwestern Medical Center lab of Sandra Schmid. The researchers used three endocytic pathways as markers to sort out 29 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) lines into two distinct clusters characterized by their endocytic dysfunction.
By linking CRISPR/Cas9 with another cutting edge technology—human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). Benjamin. Freedman, now at the University of Washington, and his colleagues in Joseph Bonventre’s lab at Harvard Medical School, have used CRISPR/Cas9 to guide hPSCs into becoming a human cell-based lab model system for polycystic kidney disease (PKD).
Ghosts are not your typical cell biology research subjects but scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) who developed a technique to observe muscle stem/progenitor cells migrating within injury sites in live mice, report that “ghost fibers,” remnants of the old extracellular matrix left by dying muscle fibers, guide the cells into position for healing to begin.
For cancer biology detectives, mitochondria have not been on the “Most Wanted” list of cellular suspects. Now growing evidence and better investigative tools are implicating mitochondria in the mystery of changes in tumor metabolism. To highlight this new research area at the 2015 Annual Meeting, ASCB has scheduled a new “Emerging Topic Symposium—Mitochondria and Cancer Cell Biology” on Monday December 14, 2015, from 6:45 pm-8:00 pm.
Three early career cell biology researchers at Princeton, UC Berkeley, and Baylor have won the American Society for Cell Biology’s first-ever ASCB-Gibco Emerging Leaders Prizes. Each will receive $5,000.
The American Society for Cell Biology, in collaboration with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, today announced the winners of the 2015 Kaluza Prizes for academic excellence in graduate student research. The three top finalists will receive cash prizes of $5,000, $3,000, and $1,000. In addition, seven other finalists will receive travel awards to attend the ASCB Annual Meeting in San Diego, December 12-16. All 10 finalists will speak at a minisymposium supported by Beckman Coulter at the ASCB Annual Meeting.
In the face of growing concerns about the reproducibility of published scientific data, a special task force of the American Society for Cell Biology has made 13 recommendations to tighten standards, improve statistics and ethics training, and encourage self-policing by life scientists.
Hailed as a pioneer in exploring the basic principles of stem cell biology, Elaine Fuchs of Rockefeller University has been named the winner of the 2015 E.B. Wilson Medal, the highest scientific honor awarded by the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB).
Three “Tell Your Own Cell Story” videos commissioned by Celldance Studios, a.k.a. the ASCB’s Public Information Committee premiere online from the 2014 ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, December 8. All three are streamable and downloadable. www.ascb.org/celldance-2014
In work to be presented at the ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia, researchers from the Institut Curie in Paris report that they have evidence of a coordinated attack on the basement membrane of human colon cells by cancer cells in situ and CAF cells in the extracellular matrix that begins long before the actual translocation of cancer cells.
Now bioengineering researchers at Temple University in Philadelphia have come up with an experimental workaround—a synthetic pediatric blood-brain barrier on a small chip—and have tested it successfully using rat brain endothelial cells (RBECs) from rat pups and human endothelial cells.
Jae-Won Shin and David Mooney of Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering in Cambridge, MA, describe building a three-dimensional (3D) hydrogel system with tunable stiffness to see how relative stiffness of the surrounding ECM affected the resistance of human myeloid leukemias to chemotherapeutic drugs.
The even more surprising answer was that rescuing the Golgi reduced Aβ accumulation significantly, apparently by re-opening a normal protein degradation pathway for the amyloid precursor protein (APP).
The average animal cell is 10 microns across but why? Princeton bioengineers take their story of gravity in cells one step further at ASCB, describing how cells manage to support thousands of membrane-less compartments inside the nucleus
A new method uses photoactivatable complementary fluorescent proteins (PACF) to observe and quantify protein-protein interactions in live cells at the single molecule level.
The search for a living laboratory model of Alzheimer’s disease (AD)—the so-called “Alzheimer’s in a dish”—has a new candidate. Håkan Toresson and colleagues at Lund University in Sweden report success in creating induced neurons that model Alzheimer’s by starting with fibroblasts taken from skin biopsies.
“JIF Day” is late this year and the DORA “anti-JIF” coalition of scientists and journal editors is greeting the delayed arrival this week of the 2014 Journal Impact Factor (JIFs) from Thomson Reuters with examples of JIF-less “good practices” for scientific assessment and a new web page.
Travelers at DC’s Dulles airport will find themselves in an exotic microscopic world as “Life: Magnified,” an exhibit of 46 eye-popping color images of life on the cellular level, opens in Concourse C. “Life: Magnified” is a project of ASCB and NIH, and the Airports Authority with support from ZEISS.
If cells were cars, the three pioneering cell biologists just named winners of the 2014 E.B. Wilson Medal, the ASCB’s highest scientific honor, helped write the essential parts list. Bill Brinkley of Baylor, John Heuser of Washington University, St. Louis, and Peter Satir of Albert Einstein College of Medicine identified crucial pieces of the cytoskeleton, the cell’s shape-shifting framework, and showed how these elements drive life at the cellular level.
The Kaluza Prizes to honor the best in graduate student bioscience research are growing. In announcing the opening of the 2014 Kaluza Prize competition, the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB), in collaboration with Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, said that the awards will increase to $5,000, $3,000, and $1,000 in ranked order for the top three winners.
The nation's largest society of research cell biologists, the ASCB, welcomes the support of Republican Senator Bill Frist for expanding federal support of embryonic stem cell research.
Acting on behalf of the White House, the National Science Foundation today awarded the ASCB the 2004 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring for its efforts to change the face of science by bringing minorities, women and other under-represented groups into research biology.
Asthma's mechanical impact on the cells lining constricted airways and how a color ink jet printer can be used to study muscle fiber formation are the two top "Hot Picks" chosen from more than 380 late-breaking abstracts.
During its life cycle, Y. pestis, the infamous "Black Death" bacteria must survive the "bio" environment of a flea in order to explode in the vastly different human system. A team turned advanced robotic high-throughput technologies on Y. pestis, looking for weaknesses in this highly adaptable killer.
Noboru Mizushima of Japan's National Institute of Genetics has disturbing news"”babies are born starving. This is no metaphor. Neonates are so hungry that they start eating themselves or, at least, newborn lab mice "˜eat' their own cells in the first three to 12 hours after birth to tide them over.
Clinical studies have shown that cigarette smoke"”whether "first-" or "second-hand""”slows wound healing and increases the risk of scarring. In a closer look at fibroblast cell migration in wound healing, researchers found that cigarette smoke delays the formation of healing tissue.
A new study provides yet more compelling evidence that defective cilia are the predominant cause of polycystic kidney disease. Defective cilia may cause kidney epithelial cell overgrowth by failing to serve as biomechanical sensors.
Johns Hopkins researcher John Gearhart has taken another small step on the road toward replenishing damaged cardiac tissue with pre-cursor cardiac cells grown from human embryonic stem cells (ES cells) in a highly reproducible system through controlled ES cell differentiation.
Using time-lapse confocal laser-scanning microscopy,NIH researchers have captured on video human T-cells zeroing in for the kill on viruses, revealing for the first time that "killer" T-cells take far longer to dispatch their viral enemies than was generally believed.
At the ASCB Meeting: Videos made by Swiss researchers employing advanced light microscopy techniques show viruses forcing their way into living cells through two previously unsuspected pathways that bypass known endosomal routes.
Severed axons do not regenerate after CNS injury because regrowth is blocked in part by glial scars. Sally Meiners of the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School designs grafts or scaffolds to bridge that barrier with small molecules from the extracellular matrix.
Parkinson's is caused by the selective death of dopamine-producing neurons. By using an agricultural pesticide known to produce "Parkinson-like" symptoms, a researcher has found connections between pesticide damage and mutated parkin.
The cell nucleus is a dynamic organelle -- "Mothership of the Human Genome" as one researcher calls it -- acting on chromatin, genes, and DNA while resisting disease. Now a study of the nuclear envelope's physical properties by molecular bioengineers and cell biologists reveals a new role"”-molecular shock absorber.
Low-level radio frequency radiation from mobile phones appears to produce biological effects on a cytoskeletal protein in human endothelial cells grown in culture, according to data released by the head of the Finnish national radiation safety laboratory.
Knowing what's hot and what's not is vital for living things. The ability to know when it's too hot and move away is called "thermotaxis." Now for the first time in animals, MIT biologists have identified a temperature-sensing protein that mediates thermotaxis.
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