Replies to post #299781 on Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[mainehiker]

agreed its tough; ill read up more on them later
yeah the cult following thing is often red flag, of course with junk like tzoo and imcl it wasnt..

[mainehiker]

Enzyme Signals Cancer, Scientists Find

(not a whole lot new here, just new article;
for newbies, gern has major stake in this field)

By SACHI JAIN
Contributing Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2004

A team of researchers from UCSF and the Lawrence Berkeley Lab have pinpointed the role of a protein-RNA complex, called telomerase, in signaling the onset of breast cancer.
Joe Gray, director of the lab’s life science division, and the team of researchers studied the importance of telomerase and telomeres in spurring cancer development.

“Telomeres are structures that protect the ends of chromosomes, but they erode in most cells during cell division so that the protective function is lost eventually. Cells with unprotected telomeres develop unstable genomes and are usually eliminated by damage surveillance mechanisms,” Gray said.

In rare instances, however, an enzyme called telomerase is activated that keeps the telomeres from degenerating, leading to unchecked cell proliferation—one of the red flags of cancer development.

The telomere research was initiated in an effort to understand how genetic abnormalities form in cancer cells. One of the experiments involved fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH), a technique in which DNA is stained with fluorescently labeled probes, allowing scientists to observe genome integrity.

In the technique, the double helix of the DNA is first separated into its complementary strands by heating, a process called denaturing. The DNA is then attached to a fluorescently labeled probe in a process called annealing.

“In most normal cell nuclei, FISH showed that there were two copies of each chromosome,” Gray said. “However, in unstable cells, we often observed greater or fewer than two copies. Application of FISH to tissue sections from breast cancers at several stages of progression allowed us to map out where the instability occured,” Gray said.

According to Gray, a major accomplishment is the discovery that the passage through the telomere crisis occurs relatively early in breast cancer.

“Treating an established tumor is much more difficult than preventing the tumor’s progression at an early stage,” Gray said.


Contact Sachi Jain at [e-mail].