Archive by date | March 2008

Define ironic…

Define ironic...

Ahead of a meeting with a representative from the recently-formed UK Research Integrity Office, I sorted through my file of papers on research misconduct. Amongst them I found a ‘News in Brief’ page from Nature Medicine, 2005 . On it, I found the headline that had caused me to photocopy the page – “Many scientists admit to misconduct”, drawing attention to a paper in its sister publication Nature published a month earlier. The paper described a survey in which it was revealed that one in three scientists has committed some type of scientific misconduct.  Read more

Placental HSCs

A recent paper in Cell Stem Cell provides some interesting new information about the origin of hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs), arguably the best characterized population of stem cells in the organism, and the one population that has been successfully used in regenerative medicine for some time.  Read more

Point of no return?

Point of no return?

Modeling Parkinson disease in animals has been very hard. The chemical models (6-OHDA and MPTP) are good to study cell replacement therapies, but not so great for pathogenesis. And the genetic models have failed to give the mouse something like true Parkinson disease — there may be alpha-synuclein aggregates or structures akin to Lewy bodies, but no cell death, or vice versa. To add to the debate, Silke Nuber and her colleagues just published in J. Neurosci. a conditional model of Parkinson in which alpha-synuclein expression can be switched off by feeding the animals doxycyclin. This is an image from the paper, showing the expression of the transgene in the two divisions of the substantia nigra of the mice.  Read more

Heal my pain with lavender

I always thought the ‘therapy’ in ‘aromatherapy’ was something nobody took seriously, sort of like ‘low-fat’ in ‘low-fat potato chip’ or ‘recycle’ in the Microsoft desktop’s ‘recycle bin’ (only in my nicey-nice hometown of Seattle would anyone get away with coining such a platitude).  Read more

Gout gene

Gout gene

Gout is an inflammatory disease that results from the deposition of uric acid crystals in the joints. It tends to be somewhat common in people with high levels of uric acid in the blood, which is, in turn, often the result of reduced renal excretion of the acid. How does this chain of events come about? Two papers in Nature Genetics give us a clue: Veronique Vitart and her colleagues and Angela Doring and her colleagues independently identified variants in the gene SLC2A9 that are linked to variability in uric acid concentrations.  Read more

Autism express II

Autism express II

There’s a saying in Spanish that roughly translated says “Calamities never arrive alone”. Following John McCain’s statement on the “strong” evidence for a link between vaccines and autism, which Charlotte Schubert blogged about, the ruling in the case of Hannah Poling is a second calamity that is bound to add more fuel to a debate that hasn’t been particularly productive.  Read more

Top models

Top models

Speaking of mammals (see the end of my previous entry), not even rats and mice always cut it when it comes to providing good models of human disease. Take, for example, cystic fibrosis. There are a couple of mouse models of the disease (we have published at least one of them), but the community does not seem to be satisfied with them. It is therefore great to see a pair of papers in the JCI reporting on two new attempts at generating the ideal model of cystic fibrosis.  Read more

Retinoids, skincare and Matthew Wood

Retinoids, skincare and Matthew Wood

People with acne will find this JCI paper of interest. 13-cis retinoic acid can be used to treat acne, as it can kill human sebaceous-gland cells by apoptosis. The molecule is teratogenic, though, making it necessary to look for alternatives. As the mechanism of action of 13-cis retinoic acid is unknown, Amanda Nelson and her colleagues tried to elucidate it, hoping to identify new targets for the treatment of the bothersome skin condition. Using transcriptional profiling of skin cells from people with acne and cultured sebaceous glands, they found that lipocalin-2 was distinctively upregulated by treatment with 13-cis retinoic acid. They also found that the apoptotic effect of 13-cis retinoic acid indeed depended on the expression of neutrophil gelatinase–associated lipocalin (NGAL), the protein encoded by lipocalin-2; by using siRNA to lipocalin-2, they blocked the apoptotic effect, and by adding recombinant NGAL, they promoted it.  Read more