Tag Archives: epithelial cells

UCLA Findings Buck Conventional Wisdom about How Stress-Response Protein Works

UCLA researchers, in a finding that runs counter to conventional wisdom, have discovered for the first time that a gene thought to express a stress-response protein in all cells that come under stress instead expresses the protein only in specific cell types.

The research team, from the Jules Stein Eye Institute at UCLA and the UCLA Division of Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine, focused on αB-Crystallin, one of a class of molecules known as heat shock proteins, which are involved in the folding and unfolding of other proteins, helping them recover from stress so they can do their job. (more…)

Read More

They Know The Drool

*The search for biomarkers of disease in spit*

It’s a researcher’s dream: a simple, noninvasive test to detect life-threatening cancer, heart disease, or other maladies while they’re still treatable.

A team of University of Minnesota researchers is in hot pursuit of that goal, using one of the simplest means imaginable: testing spit. They’ve discovered that conditions such as breast and oral cancer leak certain proteins into saliva, and if detected, such proteins can be “biomarkers” for the disease. (more…)

Read More

How the Slime Mold Gets Organized

*Cells at the tip of the slime mold’s fruiting body organize into an epithelial layer and secrete proteins as do some animals cells*

The so-called cellular slime mold, a unicellular organism that may transition into a multicellular organism under stress, has just been found to have a tissue structure that was previously thought to exist only in more sophisticated animals. What’s more, two proteins that are needed by the slime mold to form this structure are similar to those that perform the same function in more sophistical animals.

Shortly after an animal embryo forms, it develops a single layer of cells that, shaped like a hollow ball, is empty at its center. Acting as a kind of “man behind the curtain” that directs these cells to organize into this hollow formation are several proteins that help each cell touch its neighbors but keep its top surface exposed to the formation’s empty interior. (more…)

Read More