p53
jhalper | May 24, 2011This week's Weizmann news stories: A "steam release valve" for inflammation, a "brake" for cell division and an "amplifier" for quantum signals.
The steam release valve mechanism also involves an amplifier - one that ramps up the inflammation signal in response to viral attack on a cell. When the signal reaches its peak, it trips a nearby protein called caspase-8, which then kills the amps, damping the signal back down. The scientists think that failures in this mechanism could be behind various inflammatory diseases.
The brake on cell division turns out to be our old friend p53. Thirty…
edyong | December 11, 2009I've got a new story up in New Scientist about the discovery of a gene called p53 - the so-called guardian of the genome - in one of the simplest group of animals, the Placozoa.
A vital gene that defends us against cancer has been found in one of the simplest of animals - a flat, amoeba-like creature called a placozoan. The discovery shows that p53, sometimes described as the "guardian of the genome", has been around for over 1 billion years
Placozoans are so simple that it's hard to conceive of them as animals at all. They have no tissues or organs, no front or back, no left or right. They…