DeoxyriboNucleic Awesome

[lipidbilayer-blog]

[lipidbilayer-blog]

A fantastic resource, especially for undergraduate students if you can get access to it through your university or school I'd really recommend checking it out. 

If you can't, recommend it to your teachers/ librarians. 

Covers, quite comprehensively and in a really neat way everything from biochemistry to ecology, immunology neurobiology and virology. Seriously check it out.

-doupyourbutton

[lipidbilayer-blog]

Lab in the US work 24/7 on brain cancer. Motivated by the fact that they meet patients whose tumours they study on a regular basis to reinforce the urgency and huge relevance of their work. Good job guys. You have inspired me. 

-doupyourbutton

[lipidbilayer-blog]

Quorum sensing as a mechanism for metastasis

After a particularly intriguing lecture on cancer recently, I got to thinking

What if the mechanism of metastasis, is, in some ways linked to "sensing" the size of the tumour and then responding as a dispersal event, much like bacteria do in biofilms, mediated by quorum sensing signals. 

So I did a PubMed search, and sure enough people much cleverer than I have already showed this, it's a fascinating read. 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=societal%20interactions%20in%20ovarian%20cancer%20metastasis%20a%20quorum%20sensing%20hypothesis&cmd=correctspelling

This under-represented mechanism (Quorum sensing) is really only prevalant in the microbial world (not without reason) but it's fascinating. 

-doupyourbutton

[lipidbilayer-blog]

In 2009 I was introduced to the concept of quroum sensing by Professor Staffan Kjelleberg. This fantastic idea revolves around a discovery by Dr. Bonnie Bassler and colleagues at Princeton in 1993. They showed that bacteria are able to sense concentration of certain chemicals, AHLs in their environment and deduce the concentration of their species. This allowed them to regulate phenotypes such as expression of light in the light organ of squid. 

The above talk by Bonnie Bassler is amazing. I'd suggest you watch it. 

I'm going to be part of the community that do this for a living, as of next year!

-doupyourbutton 

[lipidbilayer-blog]

Secret of the Immortal Worms - Dr. Aziz Aboobaker

Extremely cool example of stem cells at work. This is just over a year old, will be interesting to see what's been happening since then. 

-doupyourbutton