Alcida’s chalk talk on her project, having to do with the study of signaling pathways in the formation cancer stem cells, was extremely interesting to me. Cancer Stem Cells are something that I haven’t heard of before, and I do wonder what— if CSC’s are in fact the cause for chemotherapy resistance—that would mean for both cancer treatments and research approaches. Considering that the lab that I’m working in is also highly interested in cancer, the concept of CSC’s would be a major target when it comes to both diagnosing and helping physicians better treat their patients via the biological assays that my lab produces.
However, what also struck me was the approach that Alcida and her mentor is taking to study cancer. More often than not, I’ve thought about cancer and cancer research being all about studying the genetics. All about the gene mutation. All about finding that incorrect base pair that ended up causing a big mess. DNA sequencing and expressing phenotypes in model organisms is how my lab does most of its research— but Alcida’s lab seems to be doing little of that.
Essentially, Alcida’s project involves taking a particular kinase—which she and her mentor deduced as being the main contributor in what they are looking for based on the work of others before them—and studying how it turns “on” or “off” a signaling pathway that is responsible for cells to adopt the Cancer Stem Cell phenotype. She does this by two main methods: Western Blotting and Fluorescent Microscopy. She conducts various experiments in which she turns on and off certain proteins and uses the blots to know the subsequent concentrations of proteins present in the cell . She also uses fluorescent nanobodies, which attach to proteins, to see where in the cell these proteins function and how that may affect the pathway. The goal is to use all of the gathered information to deduce some sort of map as to how ABL kinases ultimately change a cell’s phenotype to the CSC phenotype.
This all sounds good and relatively simple, but I can imagine that having a bunch of pretty colors and concentrations being churned out at you with what may seem like no rhyme or reason, and then having to use them to try and understand a process that you can’t really see would be pretty daunting, albeit exciting!
But, I suppose that goes to show that research is no easy venture, and Alcida’s talk also served as a good reminder that even though it’s all in the genome. . . It’s not all in the genetics.
