Scientific journal clubs are a fantastic opportunity to sharpen your presentation skills in an informal atmosphere composed of your peers.  Furthermore, regular attendance will help keep your knowledge of the scientific literature up to date and foster good scientific relationships with your colleagues. The following are a few tips to make the most of your [...]

While reading my back issues of Applied and Environmental Microbiology (AEM), I came across an interesting paper that detailed an in-depth study on the effectiveness of hand cleaners to remove Norwalk virus (NV) from intentionally contaminated hands. Yes that’s right – intentionally contaminated, and how. The study volunteers allowed a 20% stool suspension containing Norwalk virus to be [...]

We all are very familiar with the effects of cannabinoid receptor stimulation on the body. Relaxation, pain relief, and increased appetite probably come first to mind. These psychoactive effects result from activation of  the CB1 receptor found on cells in the brain by tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). But there is another receptor, called CB2, that can bind THC and other [...]

Recently, someone very close to me went through chemotherapy for a fairly common yet very scary cancer. One night as we were going over her treatments and how they were going to affect the rest of her body I compared our cancer treatments to using the biggest hammer possible, hitting a building and hoping that [...]

I had previously talked about the basics of cell-free protein synthesis and ways to improve yields from the technique. But recently I came across an article describing a technology that promises to dramatically improve the efficiency of cell free protein synthesis. The article, published in Nature Materials by Dan Lou et al from Cornell University, [...]

For something a bit more on the fun side, at least if you enjoy a pint of beer now and then – a genomic-based study has reconstructed the origins by hybridization of the lager yeast Saccharomyces pastorianus, published in the journal Genome Research [Press release]. For thousands of years, ale-type beers have been brewed with [...]

Two recent articles provide the theoretical and experimental proof that polarity and asymmetry are reducible to something as simple as diffusion – even in a complex cellular process such as aging.

Just Science week has been fun, reading four recent journal articles on focal adhesion kinase (FAK). It has helped me refresh myself on FAK as I got back to writing fellowship applications – although it had the added effect of taking time away from said writing activities. So today I thought a recap was in [...]

After the past three days of blogging focal adhesion kinase (FAK), each focusing on an important regulator of cell adhesion dynamics and cell motility, I’m going to turn my attention to phosphatidyl inositol-3 kinase (PI3K). PI3K has a regulatory subunit (p85), and a catalytic subunit (p110) capable of catalyzing the phosphorylation of the D3 position [...]

In keeping with this week’s trend of just science blogging on FAK, let’s take a look at another critical protein-protein interaction – this time with the scaffolding protein Paxillin. Specifically, how do FAK and Paxillin interact and why? Conveniently, there’s a recent paper by Danielle Scheswohl et al., from the Schaller lab: Multiple paxillin binding [...]