Journal Article

In case you haven't had a chance to boil your blood a bit today, check out yet another article about the plight of grad students and postdocs in Nature Medicine. I don't know about you but I am fed up with reading articles like these that outline the problems but spend little or no time in providing meaningful solutions. I would expect more from a Nature Med editorial. OK, this would be the point at which I emerge from precipice of hypocrisy and offer my solutions ... hypocrite am I.

This article is from June, but I had missed it. It's a very in depth article about what makes a good mentor. It's a bit of a long read, but it has lots of good information to think about.

I was recently alerted to this paper from PLoS about the deletion of ultraconserved elements. The researchers knocked out four different ultraconserved elements and it had no effect on the mice. Under normal conditions these sequences of DNA don't seem to matter, so why has there been enough evolutionary pressure for them to be so perfectly conserved?

Here's a new review about the functions of p53 mutations that also discusses the role of genetic background and cell type on the outcome of certain mutations. This review really exposes the complexity of p53 biology. I wonder if this much complexity is unique to p53 or just known about p53 because there have been so many studies?

It is well known that cancer cells' have an altered metabolism--here's an article about a study that is trying to take advantage of this difference to selectively target melanoma.

Interesting article on a novel way of selectively killing cancer cells based on homozygous deletions. There are some interesting ideas in this paper, but what is really unique is that ideas are all that is in the paper. I think the "idea" paper is becoming more and more rare, but even as recently as a few decades ago, these sorts of papers were an important part of moving science forward. I'm glad PNAS will still publish this type of paper.

Not to be too political, but now we have the ability to screen young "potential-conservatives" and intervene before it is too late.

Nice study with a simple approach to an enormously important problem. Amazing someone hasn't done this before. The mechanism(s) behind sustained transcriptional changes should be very interesting to uncover and it is safe to say they will involve both genetic and epigenetic stories.

You have to love the occasional Science article that comes out of no where and involves relatively simple off the shelf equipment. This one is mind blowing for its implications. For most of us, and for the most part, our sensory perceptions are fairly accurate. And we experience few optical illusions during routine living. But this is now about to change. The day will soon arrive when all of us will be wearing computerized info-goggles. When this day comes, imagine the implications of a "sensory virus." In the short term, this technology may have a lot of commercial implications such as sensory rewiring for those in chronic pain.

Here's a very nice article about p53 and aging. This group has crossed a mouse with 3 copies of p53 to a mouse with 3 copies of p14ARF. This enhances p53 signaling but maintains normal regulation. These mice have less cancer and an extended life span, possible through reduced ROS. It's a very thorough and extensive piece of work.