( er. The secondauthor Scott R. Granter...)Weizmann Institute scientists develop a new approach for directing treatment to metastasized prostate cancer in the bones.

er. The second author, Scott R. Granter, MD, is a pathologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The American Cancer Society expects about 55,100 people to be diagnosed with melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, in 2004, with an estimated 7,910 deaths. Melanoma can be cured when it is detected and treated early, but if the lesion penetrates deeply into the skin it is often fatal. Sun exposure is a major risk factor in the disease, which has been increasing in the past several decades. Melanocytes, which manufacture and store the pigment that combines with hair-making cells called keratinocytes to color the hair, are specialized cells spawned by colorless melanocyte stem cells. These cells were discovered by Nishimura in 2002. A pool of undifferentiated melanocyte stem cells resides in the hair follicle, and during the hair’s grow-and-rest cycle, the stem cells give rise to color-making melanocytes that journey to the bottom of the hair follicle: That is where they tint the keratinocytes with the person’s characteristic hue. By studying mice at progressively older intervals, Fisher and his colleagues discovered that as the rodents aged and their hair began turning gray, the numbers of stem cells diminished in proportion to the loss of color. The scientists were surprised to observe that, at the same time and the same rate, differentiated, pigmented melanocytes were showing up in the follicle at the location where the stem cells resided. Since they were in the wrong place, the pigmented cells likely did nothing to maintain the mice’s hair color. To see if the cells behaved the same way in humans, the investigators examined human scalp tissue taken at increasing ages, and determined that the same pattern occurred. Since cell survival in general is influenced by an “anti-death?gene called Bcl2, Fisher’s team analyzed mice lacking this gene. In a dramatic fashion, the mice lost their melanocyte stem cells shortly after birth and quickly went gray. It may be that
'"/>

Source:


Page: 1 2 3
Related biology news :

1. Weizmann Institute suggests that immune cells help to maintain cognition and brain cell renewal
2. Weizmann Institute scientists discover a molecular security mechanism for keeping mutations in check
3. Affymetrix and the Karolinska Institutet Announce Translational Medicine Strategic Alliance
4. BioMed Central welcomes the new National Institutes of Health public access policy
5. Institute for Systems Biology Symposium Addresses Need for Better Computational Tools
6. Virginia Tech, Nanjing Institute researchers discover half-billion year-old fossils
7. UC San Diego partners with Venter Institute to build marine microbial genomics cyberinfrastructure
8. Virginia Bioinformatics Institutes launches microbial database
9. Latest advances in DNA sequencing highlighted at DOE Joint Genome Institute User Meeting
10. UCLA AIDS Institute researchers find a peptide that encourages HIV infection
11. Wisconsin scientists grow critical nerve cells