Bay journal club recap

Some cool papers were discussed today in the BJC (similar to podcast, but without a mic, and with more baybes) that I want to bring to your attention:

-The chemokine growth-regulated oncogene 1 (Gro-1) links RAS signaling to the senescence of stromal fibroblasts and ovarian tumorigenesis: Epithelial-stromal interactions is the new hot thing in cancer. A lot of people are starting to believe that stroma plays an important and sometimes dominant role in carcinogenesis. One of the hypotheses is that epithelial cancer need the underlying stroma to transform into "tumour-supporting" cells for the heterologous tumour to grow. These transformed epithelial cells may control the stroma via the chemokine gro-1, and render them senescent. The senescent cells in turn direct/allow the epithelial cells to form tumours. Surprisingly the p53 -dependent senescence is required for tumour growth, since immortalizing the stromal cells actually completely inhibits tumorigenesis. So do we accumulate these senescent tumour-prone environments as we age? Is targeting p53 in the stroma a viable approach? What is special about senescent cells that makes them more tumour-supporting.



-Targeting and tracing antigens in live cells with fluorescent nanobodies: Everything nano has sex appeal. Very very small sex appeal. these nanobodies are basically single chain antibodies from the camel that are fused with gfp. You can infect/transfect the contruct expressing them to get live imaging of stuff within the cell without having to worry about fusing your gene of choice to gfp, and wether that alters it's expression/function/localization. the monoclonals are screened using phage display. The movies showing PCNA throughout S-phase are amazing.

A male contraception pill: This is cool. Most male contraceptive pills are too toxic. The reason is that anything that seems to affect testes seems to also affect the brain somehow. Perhaps because both regions are immune-priviledged, or perhaps because they both serve man's intellect. To get around this researchers have fused a drug that disconnects sertoli cells Adjudin to FSH, a male hormone that regulates sertoli cells and spermatogenesis and is only taken up by seroli cells. A nice trojan horse delivery to reduce toxicity. Yet I'm still worried about the side effects...

Finally
Perk-dependent translational regulation promotes tumor cell adaptation and angiogenesis in response to hypoxic stress. Where our very own Rob is a co-author, showing why PERKY tumours have more angiogenesis...