This is the twice-per-month electronic newsletter for basic, preclinical and translational research news related to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Please forward freely. Direct comments or questions to Joanna Downer, PhD, in the Office of Corporate Communications (4-5105, jdowner1@jhmi.edu).
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IN THIS ISSUE:
RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:
+ Brain's Immune System Triggered in Autism
+ New Tool Highlights Activity of cyclic AMP
+ New Protein “Stop Sign” Alters Blood Vessel Growth
+ Stem Cells' Repair Skills Might Be Link to Cancer
NEWS BRIEFS:
Young Investigators' Day Entries Due Jan. 11
Seminar on Normalizing Microarray Data Dec. 15
JHM Launches "Imagine" Campaign
HONORS AND AWARDS:
Scheifele Awarded Damon Runyon Fellowship
Partin Named New Director of Urology
Ladenson Elected President of Thyroid Association
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Do you have an interesting research finding about one month from publication or presentation? Send manuscripts to Joanna Downer at jdowner1@jhmi.edu or fax to 410-614-8951. Information about awards and honors received by laboratory personnel and others is welcomed also.
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RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS:
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11/15/04
Brain's Immune System Triggered in Autism
A Johns Hopkins study has found new evidence that the brains of some people with autism show clear signs of inflammation, suggesting that the disease may be associated with activation of the brain's immune system and offering a possible target for intervention.
"These findings reinforce the theory that immune response in the brain is involved in autism, although it is not yet clear whether the inflammation is a consequence of disease or a cause of it, or both," said Carlos Pardo-Villamizar, MD, assistant professor of neurology and pathology. The findings are described in the Nov. 15 early online section of Annals of Neurology.
Led by postdoctoral fellow Diana Vargas, MD, the researchers found that, compared with normal control brains, the brains of 11 people with autism (who had died of accidents or injuries) showed evidence of an ongoing inflammatory process in different regions of the brain, says Pardo. Cytokine and chemokine levels in the cerebrospinal fluid also were abnormally elevated in six living patients with autism.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_15a_04.html
Ann Neurol (Published online 15 Nov. 2004)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/109793289/HTMLSTART
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11/15/04
New Tool Highlights Activity of cyclic AMP
Scientists at Johns Hopkins and the University of Texas Medical Branch have created a new tool that easily reveals when and where cyclic AMP, a key cellular signal, is active.
The development, described in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, should speed identification of the signal's triggers and effects in normal processes and in conditions such as lung disease and heart disease. Cyclic AMP carries messages from hormones or other molecules "knocking" at the cell's door to proteins inside the cell.
"Scientists suspected that timing and location of cyclic AMP activity was important to its ability to pass on many specific messages, but there was no easy way to study its activity in living cells in real time and space [until now]," says Jin Zhang, PhD, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of pharmacology and molecular sciences and of neuroscience in Johns Hopkins' Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
To create the new fluorescent tool, an important variation on others' earlier attempts, pharmacology graduate student Lisa DiPilato added fluorescent caps to a protein called Epac that is activated by cyclic AMP. DiPilato then proved that cyclic AMP activation of Epac changed the fluorescent nature of the caps, an effect known as fluorescent resonance energy transfer.
Addition of a genetic "address label" then allowed her to direct the fluorescent probe to particular places in cells -- the cell membrane, the nucleus or the mitochondria.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_15_04.html
PNAS 23 Nov. 2004;101(47):16513-16518.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/101/47/16513
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11/18/04
New Protein “Stop Sign” Alters Blood Vessel Growth
In experiments with mice, a research team led by Johns Hopkins scientists has discovered an unusual protein pair that stops blood vessels’ growth in the developing back.
Results of the studies, published Nov. 18 in the express online edition of Science, may help researchers trying to prevent blood flow that nourishes tumors or trying to exploit the signals vessels emit during growth to help regrow damaged nerves.
During development, protein "signs" tell growing blood vessels which way to go and when to stop or turn back. Scientists already knew that semaphorins, a big family of "stop" proteins, work by binding two proteins, or receptors, on the leading edge of a budding blood vessel. In new experiments, the Hopkins-led team reports that semaphorin 3E unexpectedly needs just one receptor partner.
"It's a totally new observation of blood vessel growth in development, and it has made us rethink how the semaphorins control this process," says lead author Chenghua Gu, DVM, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience in Hopkins' Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
Gu and others from the laboratories of neuroscience professors Alex Kolodkin, PhD, and David Ginty, PhD, engineered a version of Sema3E that colors its binding partner blue. Their initial experiments suggested, and later experiments proved, that the binding partner was plexin-D1, a previously described protein found in blood vessels and nerves.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_18a_04.html
Science (Published online 18 Nov. 2004)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/1105416v1
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11/18/04
Stem Cells' Repair Skills Might Be Link to Cancer
Johns Hopkins researchers say there is growing evidence that stem cells gone awry in their efforts to repair tissue damage could help explain why long-term irritation, such as from alcohol or heartburn, can create a breeding ground for certain cancers.
At the heart of their argument, outlined in the Nov. 18 issue of Nature, are two key chemical signals, called Hedgehog and Wnt ("wint"), that are active in the stem cells that repair damaged tissue. Recently, the signals also have been found in certain hard to treat cancers, supporting an old idea that some cancers may start from normal stem cells that have somehow gone bad.
Over the last 10 years, researchers have found examples of so-called cancer stem cells -- the cells within a tumor that are capable of regrowing it -- in certain malignancies of the blood, breast and brain. However, it's usually not clear whether these cancer stem cells came from the tissue's normal, primitive stem cells or from the tissue's mature cells.
"Cancers associated with chronic irritation may be a good setting in which to determine whether stem cells are the starting place of tumors," says Phil Beachy, PhD, professor of molecular biology and genetics in Hopkins' Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
Beachy and long-time collaborators and co-authors Sunil Karhadkar, MD, and David Berman, MD, PhD, suggest that chronic irritation might help trap normal stem cells in perpetual activation, and subsequent changes in the cells may send them over the edge.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_22_04.html
Nature 18 Nov. 2004;432(7015):324-331.
http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/dynapage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v432/n7015/full/nature03100_fs.html
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NEWS BRIEFS:
Young Investigators' Day Entries Due Jan. 11 -- Applications for awards of the 28th annual School of Medicine Young Investigators' Day are due by 3 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 11, 2005, in Room 501A, Pre-Clinical Teaching Building. The awards recognize basic and clinical research undertaken by applicants while registered as students or postdoctoral fellows. Student applicants who graduated or left Hopkins prior to Sept. 1, 2004, are not eligible. Postdoctoral applications who were promoted to faculty or left Hopkins before Sept. 1 also are not eligible. Detailed instructions are available on the Call for Abstracts boards located throughout the East Baltimore campus. All winners must be present at Young Investigators' Day, April 14, 2005. Download the coversheet at: http://www.mbg.jhmi.edu/cv/YID.pdf
Seminar on Normalizing Microarray Data Dec. 15 -- The next lecture in the series Top 10 Things to Know in Microarray Data Analysis, entitled "Normalizing and Background Correcting Affymetrix and cDNA Arrays," will be presented by Rafael Irizarry, PhD, of the Department of Biostatistics, Dec. 15 starting at 2:30 p.m. in Room E9519 in the Bloomberg School of Public Health. The Seminar series is jointly sponsored by the JHMI Microarray Core Facility, the Hopkins Expressionists working group, and the BSPH Department of Biostatistics.
http://www.microarray.jhmi.edu/Seminar/
JHM Launches "Imagine" Campaign -- Johns Hopkins Medicine launched a six-month multimedia advertising and public relations campaign in New York on Nov. 28. Created in conjunction with Eisner Communications, ads in New York will run during CBS's Face The Nation, CBS News' Sunday Morning with Charles Osgood, and NBC's Meet The Press. The campaign also will be a sponsor of PBS evening programming and run ads in Forbes and The New York Times Magazine. The campaign will be seen in Baltimore starting in January.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_02a_04.html
HONORS AND AWARDS:
Scheifele Awarded Damon Runyon Fellowship -- Lisa Z. Scheifele, PhD, was recently given a Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation's Fellowship Award for her project "Stability of high copy retrotransposons in the genome." Scheifele is a postdoctoral fellow working with Jef Boeke, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the HighThroughput Biology Center (HiT Center) in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
http://www.drcrf.org/apFellowship.html
Partin Named New Director of Urology --Alan Partin, MD, PhD, a world-renowned expert in the study and treatment of prostate cancer, is the new director of the Johns Hopkins Department of Urology and the Brady Urological Institute, and the new urologist in chief of The Johns Hopkins Hospital, as of Nov. 15. He succeeds Patrick Walsh, MD, who led the department for three decades and will remain on the urology faculty devoting his full time to patient care, surgery and research.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/11_12_04.html
Ladenson Elected President of Thyroid Association -- Paul Ladenson, MD, professor and director of the division of endocrinology and metabolism, was elected president of the American Thyroid Association (ATA) at its recent annual meeting in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Ladenson will serve a one-year term as head of the association, the North American professional society for physicians and researchers specializing in diseases of the thyroid gland.
http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/Press_releases/2004/12_02_04.html
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. Scheifele is a postdoctoral fellow working with Jef Boeke, Ph.D., professor of molecular biology and genetics and director of the HighThroughput Biology Center (HiT Center) in the Institute for Basic Biomedical Sciences.
--JHMI--
