After watching CSI, and with forensic science being more advanced than ever, it’s easy to presume that criminals leave DNA traces everywhere that can help to make a conviction if they are caught. Human hairs come to mind as a great place to start, however, the majority of samples recovered at crime scenes are shed… Read more »
Cheng Cheng is from the School of Life Science & Technology at Xi’an Jiaotong University, China, and Jun Yu is from the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences. They are authors of an article published in Genome Biology which has revealed the genomic ‘signatures’ of extinction events in birds. In this post they… Read more »
Today’s guest blog is a Cancer Research UK Career Development Fellow, Jurre Kamphorst, a researcher focusing on the metabolic stress responses in cancer cells and lead author of a study published in Cancer & Metabolism. Unlike normal cells, cancer cells are wired to just keep on growing. This continued growth requires a constant supply of cellular building blocks, including fatty acids for… Read more »
New research published today in Clinical Epigenetics questions the methods used in some studies for assessing DNA methylation in cancer, calling for the use of only quantitative techniques. This is a guest blog by Dr Annette Lim (Peter MacCallum Cancer Center, Australia) and Dr Alexander Dobrovic (Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research and Olivia Newton-John Cancer Research Institute, Australia) to explain… Read more »
Written by Dr Anne-Marie Baird, Queensland University of Technology, Australia Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) arises in the pleural cavity in the lungs, from the mesothelial cells. It is an aggressive inflammatory cancer, which has been associated with asbestos exposure since the early 1960s. The lag period between exposure and the development of MPM is significant,… Read more »