Merlin

September 24, 2013 at 2:57 pm

by Juliane

Merlin-the wise wizard, the guardian of ancient wisdom long since lost in the fog of time. Merlin,who played a pivotal role in the epic that unfolded around King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table by placing a sword into a stone.

Merlin– a regulator of the Hippo/SWH signalling pathway. Merlin,who plays a pivotal role in suppressing tumorgenesis by downregulating the E3 ubiquitin ligase complex.

 

Merlin stands for moesin-ezrin-radixin-like protein and is also known as NF2 or Schwannomin. People with deletions or mutations of merlin suffer from benign tumours formed by Schwann cells, which can press on neurons and lead to deafness and balance disorder in early adulthood.

Merlin was discovered in 1993 by James Troffater in James Gusella’s lab at Mass General Hospital, possibly after holding a lab retreat at a renaissance fair.

References:
Troffater et al. (1993) A Novel Moesin-, Ezrin-, Radixin-like Gene Is a Candidate for the Neurofibromatosis 2 Tumor Suppressor Cell, Vol. 72, 791400
Yogesha et al. (2011) Unfurling of the band 4.1, ezrin, radixin, moesin (FERM) domain of the merlin tumor suppressor. Protein Sci. 20: 2113-2120 http://commons.wikimedia.org/

By julianeh | Posted in Protein of the week | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Contribute to the postdoc blog

September 21, 2013 at 2:23 pm

by Juliane

Dear BU postdocs!

Maybe you have just read a couple of posts on the brand new postdoc blog. If so  hopefully you think: “Neat! I like it and will read it again next week”

That is great, thank you and come back again soon.

But maybe you were thinking:  ”This is a nice blog, but it could be awesome, if I was involved.”

Here is good news for you: the postdoc blog needs contributors.

There are different ways to be part of the blog:

Spread the word: Tell other people in your lab about us, post on facebook or twitter

Comment: Just post in the comments, give some feedback, help us improve our writing and choose topics that interest you

Post: If you are excited about a topic, it could be your work, a policy issue, or your summer vacation; write a blog post about it. Everything written by a postdoc will be published, unless it is slanderous or longer than 10000 words.

Contribute: If you are really excited about a topic, like neuroscience, career choices for postdocs with children, the representation of scientists in movies, baseball, etc…; you might consider becoming a regular contributor. You will get access to the dashboard of the blog, so you can post whenever you want. You can write posts on your favorite topic on a regular or semi-regular basis, once a week or once a month or even less often depending on your schedule and workload. Other contributors and posts will keep the reader interested until your next post.

Edit: If you don’t feel like writing yourself, you might like to proofread or edit posts before they get posted.

If you are interested in any of this, comment on the blog or email me: julianeh@bu.edu

 

By julianeh | Posted in Housekeeping | Tagged | Comments (128)

Science on Screen

September 19, 2013 at 12:13 pm

by Juliane

The Coolidge corner cinema in Brookline made a great start into their 9th season of Science on Screen by arranging a special showing of Memento. This was preceded by an introductory talk by John Gabrieli from MIT, who worked for many years with the patient who was the inspiration for this movie. The patient, H.M., suffered from anterograde amnesia following surgery in 1953 until his death in 2008. He gave a fascinating overview into the neurobiology of amnesia and made it interesting enough to make me do some additional reading on neurology and amnesia.

The Coolidge cinema started this interesting series 8 years ago with support from local sponsors, such as the Museum of Science and are recipients of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation. Classic movies are introduced by an expert on the science topic depicted in the movie, e.g. Marvin Minsky, who works with artificial intelligence at MIT introduced 2001: A Space Odyssey last year.

The movie series was designed to provide “the perfect combination of entertainment and enlightenment -  even for the most science-phobic culture vulture”, but movie-loving scientists can also enjoy classic movies on the big screen.

The introductory talks are not science lectures, but are interesting presentations for a lay audience that make you watch a beloved movie from a different angle.

Science on screen shows every third Monday of the month at the Coolidge cinema (T-stop Coolidge corner, Green C line), tickets are normally sold out the week before, so make sure to book early. The next screening on 21st October is Young Frankenstein with a preceding talk by Dany Spencer Adams, Ph.D., a Principle Investigator at the Tufts Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, part of the Biology Department at Tufts University.

 

By julianeh | Posted in Movies | Tagged | Comments (0)

Popular Science Articles – Something for Everyone

September 18, 2013 at 8:55 am

compiled by Noah

In this regular series, I will highlight fascinating new and old articles covering most scientific fields.

1. The mouse trap - The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease (Slate, November 2011)

A huge and long overdue examination of possible drawbacks associated with the over use of the mouse as a disease model in biomedical research

Part 1 : The mouse trap

Part 2: The trouble with black-6

Part 3: The anti-mouse

2. The fall and rise of gene therapy (Wired Magazine, August 2013)

A fascinating overview of the history of what may yet prove to be an indespensible component of medicine.

3. It’s spreading - Outbreaks, media scares, and the parrot panic of 1930 (New Yorker, June 2009)

Media hype and bad reporting are not only common features of modern reporting into zoonotic infectious diseases.

4. Some of my best friends are germs (NYT Magazine, May 2013)

The author Michael Pollan takes a close and personal look at the latest research into the human gut microbiome.

5. Has Carl June found a key to fighting cancer? (Philadelphia Magazine, August 2013)

An inspiring story of how basic research could lead to novel therapies against cancer in which the power of the patient’s own immune system is tuned to fight back.

 

By julianeh | Posted in Popular Science Articles | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Protein of the week

September 17, 2013 at 11:24 am

Introducing: Protein of the week

by Juliane

Everybody knows scientists are very serious people, who spend all of their time in the lab working out which proteins are expressed in cells and what those proteins do. Whenever they find a new protein they give it a name and a number, like A1XT53, that nobody can remember.

But not all of us are very serious, some are just serious, and those scientists give their favorite proteins more interesting names, for example

Raptor

This is a raptor:

So is this:

The regulatory associated protein of mTOR is part of the mTOR (mammalian target of rapamycin) complex as a scaffold that recruits other mTOR interaction partners. mTOR got its name from its yeast homolog TOR (target of rapamycin) which was identified by mutation studies in the 1990s. Since then the TOR and mTOR complexes have been found to be involved in the regulation of cell growth and autophagy. It regulates the important translation initiation factor eIF4E through phosphorylation of its inhibitor eIF4E-BP, thereby enhancing general translation efficiency in the cell. However, without raptor recruiting eIF4E-BP to the mTOR complex, this phosphorylation could never happen.

The creative, dinosaur-loving scientists behind this name are:  Kenta Hara, Yoshiko Maruki, Xiaomeng Long,  Ken-ichi Yoshino, Noriko Oshiri, Sujuti Hidayat, Chiharu Tokunaga, Joseph Avruch and  Kazuyoshi Yonezawa from the Biosignal research center in Kobe, Japan.

 

References:

Hara et al. 2002 Raptor, a Binding Partner of Target of Rapamycin (TOR), Mediates TOR Action, Cell Volume 110, Issue 2, Pages 177–189

http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot/Q8N122

jurrasicpark.wikia.com

www.abcam.com

 

By julianeh | Posted in Protein of the week | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Introducing the Post-Doc Blog

September 16, 2013 at 2:31 pm

"Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham www.phdcomics.com

What is a postdoc supposed to do?

Research? Career development? Supervision? Job hunting?

Research whatever the PI wants? Develop your own project? Write papers? Read papers? Think outside the box? Finish old projects? Start new projects? Find collaborations? Do what you want?

Go to Seminars? Attend workshops? Network? Tweet? Join linkedIn? Researchgate? Lablife? Get an MBA online?

Supervise PhD students? Interns? Technicians? Develop their projects? Listen to their stories? Dry their tears after committee meetings? Give everybody advice and chocolate? Order things? Make the cleaning roster? Organize lab meetings?

Apply for jobs? Find your own funding? Apply for grants? For your PI? With your PI? By yourself? Apply for fellowships?

It is confusing to become a postdoc, all of a sudden you are alone and nobody cares about you; no committee to meet, no supervisor to please, no student office demanding money and to know when you graduate.

But now here we are: new challenges and new chances.

That’s what we want to write about on this blog.

There are many topics postdocs care about and we hope to cover some of them here. Since this is only the beginning we are very open to suggestions from all postdocs around BU. But here are some topics we will cover as soon as possible:

With science being the most important topic for postdocs in science, we will try to blog about generally interesting stories from across the spectrum of scientific research.

Postdocs are of an age where the prospect of family and children becomes increasingly real and the achievement of a good work/life balance becomes important, as well as topics such as parental leave and childcare.

Career advice comes in many different forms, career seminars from the Office of Postdoctoral Affairs, interesting links on linkedIn, and counseling with Lauren Celano, but hopefully also articles on this blog.

According to the national postdoc association, 60% of postdocs in the US are international. This adds another layer of complication to the already complicated challenge of finding your way to a happy and successful postdoc.

If you have any suggestions or comments, or want to contribute to the BU postdoc blog, please leave a comment or email (julianeh@bu.edu).

 

 

 

By tdavies | Posted in Housekeeping | Comments (10)