Chromosome Ends and Diseases of Aging
UCSF Professor Elizabeth Blackburn explores the effects of aging on a cellular level.
Online repository of biological information which aims to create a knowledge base for students by the provision of animations and lectures.
Chromosome Ends and Diseases of Aging
Unwinding Clock Genetics
The fruit fly has taught scientists a great deal about the daily rhythms of animals and their internal biological clocks. Dr. Michael Rosbash explains how he and colleagues cloned the first gene identified as having an important role in the function of the clock. His work opened up the molecular analysis of biological clocks and represents one of the most advanced studies of how genes affect behavior
Frontiers in Cancer Diagnostics: Chipping Away at Cancer
Clinical practice informs basic science research, and that research in turn informs clinical practice. In the field of oncology discoveries in molecular biology and genetics have revolutionized clinical care for patients with cancer. This series begins at the "bench" with Katherine Hyland and Joseph DeRisi describing genomic alterations that occur in cancer cells and how applications of genomic technologies use this information for diagnostic and therapeutic management Series.
Induced Pluripotent stem (iPS ) Cells
Induced pluripotent stem cells, commonly abbreviated as iPS cells or iPSCs are a type of pluripotent stem cell artificially derived from a non-pluripotent cell, typically an adult somatic cell, by inducing a "forced" expression of specific genes.
Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells are similar to natural pluripotent stem cells, such as embryonic stem (ES) cells, in many respects, such as the expression of certain stem cell genes and proteins, chromatin methylation patterns, doubling time, embryoid body formation, teratoma formation, viable chimera formation, and potency and differentiability, but the full extent of their relation to natural pluripotent stem cells is still being assessed.
iPSCs were first produced in 2006 from mouse cells and in 2007 from human cells. This has been cited as an important advance in stem cell research, as it may allow researchers to obtain pluripotent stem cells, which are important in research and potentially have therapeutic uses, without the controversial use of embryos. They may also be less prone to immune rejection than embryonic stem cells because of the fact that they are derived entirely from the patient.
Depending on the methods used, reprogramming of adult cells to obtain iPSCs may pose significant risks that could limit its use in humans. For example, if viruses are used to genomically alter the cells, the expression of cancer-causing genes or oncogenes may potentially be triggered. In February 2008, in ground-breaking findings published in the journal Cell, scientists announced the discovery of a technique that could remove oncogenes after the induction of pluripotency, thereby increasing the potential use of iPS cells in human diseases[3]. In April 2009, Sheng Ding and colleagues in La Jolla, California, demonstrated that generation of iPS cells is possible without any genetic alteration of the adult cell: A repeated treatment of the cells with certain proteins channeled into the cells via poly-arginine anchors was sufficient to induce pluripotency. The acronym given for those iPSCs is piPSCs
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