Lab Expectations

Cancer cells stimulate their own growth, which means they become self-sufficient in growth signals, and no longer depend on external signals (like Epidermal Growth Factor EGF/ EGFR). Proliferation depends highly on these three important pathways: Akt, MAPK/Erk, and MTOR.

Cancer cells stimulate the growth of blood vessels to supply nutrients to tumors. Angiogenesis is the formation of new blood vessels from pre-existing blood vessels. This plays an important role in tumor growth.

Cancer cells need a lot of energy to grow fast—to do so, they show abnormal metabolic pathways.

One thing we know about cancer cells: they can resist death. They evade apoptosis, the mechanism that programs cell death once cells become damaged. Normally, apoptosis helps keep an organism healthy through growth and development, maintaining body tissue by removing infected or damaged cells. But cancer cells do not follow this process, no matter how abnormally they grow.

Running an ELISA can be a pain. Identifying pairs for an ELISA is a tedious business, and that’s before developing and validating the ELISA assay itself. Using a kit can simplify the process, but at what cost? Will that kit hinder reproducibility by introducing lot-to-lot variability over the course of my project’s lifetime? Many kits still require numerous reagent addition, incubation, and wash steps that add hands-on time and complexity to your assay.

Flow cytometry enables quantitative analysis of protein expression, signaling states, and physical characteristics (cell size/granularity) at the single-cell level. Modern flow cytometers are capable of collecting data on multiple proteins from thousands of cells per second in a heterogeneous mixture. While flow cytometry is commonly employed to identify cell types using phenotypic markers expressed on the cell surface, it can also be used to measure intracellular signaling events.

Hear about the potential role of innate immunity in neurodegeneration and cognitive function, particularly in Alzheimer's disease. Learn how immune-related pathways regulate the development, refinement, and elimination of specific axons and synapses during development. Gain an understanding of how recent work can provide insight into protecting synapses in neurodegenerative and psychiatric disorders of synaptic dysfunction.

Our headquarters happens to be in the U.S. So we're taking some time to celebrate the Fourth of July. But also, Sunday was Canada Day for our northern neighbors and Bastille Day is coming up on July 14th. Happy Independence Day to anyone celebrating around the world. And to Australia, Cheers Mate, Happy Winter.

Our previous blog post, “Painless Publication: How to Write a Journal Abstract,” walked you through the steps in writing the abstract for a journal article. Now we turn our focus to writing abstracts for conference proceedings. Although there are some similarities between these two types of abstracts, there are also some distinct considerations and approaches for conference abstracts.