Scott McAuley, a grad student in the Nodwell lab, and business partner Leo Mui, were featured in the recent issue of U of T Magazine. The two U of T grad students formed the company Lunanos and are developing a reusable disinfectant indicator sticker for use on rolling hospital equipment as a tool for infection control. Prototypes will shortly be tested in hospitals in Toronto and the Philippines.
The Hippo pathway is a conserved intracellular signaling pathway with important roles in various aspects of development and homeostasis in animals. Defects in Hippo pathway regulation are associated with various types of cancers. Factors such as cell-cell contact, cell morphology and G-protein coupled receptors have been shown to regulate the Hippo pathway but the mechanisms are not very well understood.
In work published in the latest edition of the EMBO Journal, the Attisano lab describe a new regulator of this pathway, ARHGEF7 (also known as β-Pix). […]
Planar cell polarity (PCP), is a form of tissue organization that is critical for normal development. Dysfunction in PCP can result in several human cancers. PCP can be readily assessed in the Drosophila eye, by the ordered ommatidial array shown below:
One of the key factors in the PCP pathway is the cell adhesion molecule called Fat. Using a combination of genetics and biochemistry, the McNeill (Mt. Sinai, Dept. Mol. Gen.) […]
Dr. Palazzo, in collaboration with Dr. T. Ryan Gregory from the University of Guelph, published a perspective titled “The Case for Junk DNA” that appeared in the May 2014 issue of PLOS Genetics. It was highlighted on the National Geographic website.
With the advent of deep sequencing technologies and the ability to analyze whole genome sequences and transcriptomes, there has been […]
The March 23rd issue of Nature Methods highlights the Stagljar Lab‘s development of the mammalian membrane two-hybrid (MaMTH) assay and its application to the human epidermal growth receptor (EGFR), mutations of which are associated with lung cancer. Using this approach, they identified CrkII as an interactor of the mutated EGFR and showed that Crk II regulates the stability of mutated EGFR and thus promotes signaling within […]
In a study published in the April 29th issue of Science, Professor David Isenman of Biochemistry and Jean van den Elsen of the University of Bath shed light on the complex between complement receptor 2 and its ligand C3d, both of which are constituents of an innate immune system of our body known as complement.
The molecular details of the CR2-C3d interface have been mired in controversy for the past decade. […]
Researchers at the University of Toronto and Goethe University in Germany have discovered a protein that can inhibit the growth of cancer cells, providing crucial clues for the future development of new drugs to treat the disease.
The protein, called HDAC6, controls the stability of the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR), a key player in cancer.
“Our teams discovered that HDAC6 acts as a molecular brake to shut down the expression of […]
