A Shout Out for the Scallop
May 17, 2013
Kathryn Markey is one of the 2013 winners of the Nikon Small World in Motion contest. Nikon Small World in Motion is a sister competition to Nikon’s image contest, Nikon Small World, and focuses on the trend in digital photomicrography of recording movies or digital time-lapse photography through the microscope.
Mackey's winning submission focused on the scallop, which we agree is an extremely interesting creature deserving of more attention. As Markey’s movie shows there is more to this creature than being part of someone’s dinner. So, we asked Markey to elaborate on her favorite shellfish, her research, and why more people s...
A nose for diagnosis
April 30, 2013
Until now, biomarkers for schizophrenia have only been found in the neuron cells of the brain, which is only available post mortem. Mental health professionals have had to rely on a battery of psychological evaluations to diagnose their patients. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) have been implicated in neurodevelopmental and psychiatr...
Cancer killing efficiency captured on video
April 25, 2013
Using high-powered laser-based microscopes, researchers have made videos to investigate why the drug rituximab is so effective at killing cancerous B cells. They discovered that rituximab tended to stick to one side of the cancer cell, forming a cap and drawing a number of proteins over to that side. When the natural kil...
A Look at Live Cell Imaging: Introducing Perfect Focus
April 8, 2013
Live cell imaging is a key component in the study of cell biology, playing a critical role across a variety of disciplines and allowing for unprecedented insight into the fundamental nature of cell function. The process of keeping cells alive and in focus, however, throughout the length of an experiment comes with a seri...
Stem cells get a grip
March 29, 2013
Researchers studying how material signals can regulate stem cell differentiation have cultured mesenchymal stem cells (hMSCs ) in water-swollen polymer networks known as hydrogels, which share some similarities with the environments stem cells naturally grow in. hMSCs are found in bone marrow and can develop into several...
New Down’s syndrome protein found
March 24, 2013
Researchers have identified a protein, SNX27, involved in Down’s syndrome that could explain its learning deficits. Mice deficient in the SNX27 protein were found to have fewer glutamate receptors, which are important for learning and memory, exhibiting similar characteristics to mice with Down’s syndrome. The study show...
Cultured teeth a possibility
March 9, 2013
Research has shown that human epithelial cells can be isolated from adult human gingival tissue that can be expanded in vitro and, when combined with mouse embryonic tooth mesenchyme cells cultured to be "inducing", form teeth. Teeth with developing roots can be produced from this cell combination following tra...
Glial cells make you cleverer
March 7, 2013
Human astrocytes (a type of glial cell) are larger and more complex than those of infraprimate mammals, suggesting that their role in neural processing has expanded with evolution. To assess the cell-autonomous and species-selective properties of human glia, researchers have implanted human glial progenitor cells into ne...
Misfolded proteins in degenerative diseases
March 3, 2013
People with a rare inherited syndrome, multisystem proteinopathy, have been found to have misbehaving proteins that fold incorrectly, change the shape of surrounding proteins, and clump together—much the way disease-causing prions do. These results indicate that the 250 or so human proteins with similar prion-like domain...
Using magnetism to study metastases
February 25, 2013
Cell isolation via antibody-targeted magnetic beads is a powerful tool for research and clinical applications, most recently for isolating circulating tumour cells (CTCs). A new study utilising a clinically-relevant antibody against the cancer target HER2 (ERBB2) for magnetic cell isolation showed that cytoskeletal polym...
