Brian Stallard, Author at ��ϳԹ��Դ

How breast cancer cells sneak past local immune defenses

Brian Stallard — Wed, 15 Jul 2020 14:00:17 +0000

��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Associate Professor Mikala Egeblad and her colleagues describe a newly understood way by which breast cancer cells sabotage a key player in the body’s immune system. That key player provides local immune surveillance by activating killer T-cells, but if it cannot mature and do its job, breast cancer cells can...

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How an antiviral immune reaction can go too far

Brian Stallard — Sat, 23 May 2020 13:00:18 +0000

Cold Spring Harbor Lab Associate Professor Mikala Egeblad studied cancer before the COVID-19 pandemic. But when she read reports about severe cases of the disease, she realized that those coronavirus patients might suffer from something similar to what some cancer patients experience. Neutrophils, a common type of white blood cells, try to trap and digest...

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Teachers make genomes more useful… from home

Brian Stallard — Thu, 21 May 2020 16:00:57 +0000

Imagine a book written with all the right words, but no spaces between words, no punctuation, no chapter headings—it would look like a senseless string of letters one after the other. That is what the first draft of a genome sequence looks like. To make sense of the long string of letters, scientists have programmed...

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How to tune out common odors and focus on important ones

Brian Stallard — Mon, 11 May 2020 19:00:27 +0000

“Imagine a dog playing in a garden and smelling all of these different flowery smells, and then somewhere in the distance a predator appears, like a fox. The raw input coming into the dog’s nose is a smell that consists of something like 90% flowers and only five or 10% of this predator,” CSHL Associate...

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Predicting the evolution of genetic mutations

Brian Stallard — Tue, 14 Apr 2020 09:00:04 +0000

Quantitative biologists David McCandlish and Juannan Zhou at ��ϳԹ��Դ have developed an algorithm with predictive power, giving scientists the ability to see how specific genetic mutations can combine to make critical proteins change over the course of a species’s evolution. Described in Nature Communications, the algorithm called “minimum epistasis interpolation” results in...

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A science career path: David McCandlish

Brian Stallard — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 13:00:19 +0000

His interdisciplinary research began by reading a book. hen you see his office, with books stacked from floor to ceiling and papers strewn across desks, it’s clear that David McCandlish is an avid reader. As an assistant professor and quantitative biologist at CSHL, McCandlish endeavors to stay up to date on the newest and greatest...

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Carol Greider: Nobel Prize-winning rogue biologist

Brian Stallard — Tue, 31 Mar 2020 18:50:11 +0000

Dr. Carol Greider proudly calls herself a “rogue scientist.” That iconoclastic approach led to her Nobel Prize-winning work on telomeres, and to becoming a champion for women in science. “You can do whatever you want, but you have to like whatever you do.” That’s what Carolyn “Carol” Greider’s father told her when she was growing...

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Barbara McClintock: Free to discover

Brian Stallard — Mon, 23 Mar 2020 15:31:33 +0000

Barbara McClintock missed an important call on the morning of October 10, 1983. She had chosen “to be free” of the interruptions that came with owning a telephone, and so it was her students and colleagues who told her that she had received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. “That’s nice,” she said with...

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Images of ‘invisible’ holes on cells may jumpstart research

Brian Stallard — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 14:00:19 +0000

High blood pressure, inflammation, and the sensation of pain may rely in part on tiny holes on the surface of cells, called pores. Living cells react to the environment, often by allowing water and other molecules to pass through the cell’s surface membrane. Protein-based pores control this flow. One set of pores, called pannexins, are...

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Mutation’s role in blood cancers revealed by ideal team-up

Brian Stallard — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 20:47:37 +0000

A genetic mutation that disrupts how DNA sends messages to the rest of a cell has been linked to a large number of blood cancers. Thanks to a collaboration between biologists at ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) and an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), we now know how the mutation triggers a...

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New look at odd holes involved in taste, Alzheimer’s, asthma

Brian Stallard — Mon, 27 Jan 2020 16:00:39 +0000

Many cells are covered with mysterious large holes, pores that have been associated with the sense of taste as well as Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and even asthma. Knowing the structure of these varied holes will help researchers better understand this range of associations and provide a blueprint for developing new therapies. “One of the most...

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New tool for investigating brain cells, Parkinson’s, & more

Brian Stallard — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 10:00:53 +0000

NMDARs (N-methyl-D-aspartate receptors) serve as valves on nerve cells, controlling the flow of electrical signals in the brain. This special group of receptors is suspect in many neurological diseases, including Alzheimer’s, epilepsy, stroke, and Parkinson’s. Biologists from ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) and chemists from the University of Bristol have joined forces, creating a chemical...

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Vitamin B6, leukemia’s deadly addiction

Brian Stallard — Mon, 13 Jan 2020 16:33:14 +0000

Scientists have discovered that Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) grows by taking advantage of the B6 vitamin to accelerate cell division. The research team from ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) suggest they could halt the growth of this cancer by limiting its ability to manipulate the enzyme that pushes...

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Finally, machine learning interprets gene regulation clearly

Brian Stallard — Thu, 26 Dec 2019 14:00:20 +0000

In this age of “big data,” artificial intelligence (AI) has become a valuable ally for scientists. Machine learning algorithms, for instance, are helping biologists make sense of the dizzying number of molecular signals that control how genes function. But as new algorithms are developed to analyze even more data, they also become more complex and...

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A new tomato ideal for urban gardens and even outer space

Brian Stallard — Mon, 23 Dec 2019 16:00:38 +0000

Farmers could soon be growing tomatoes bunched like grapes in a storage unit, on the roof of a skyscraper, or even in space. That’s if a clutch of new gene-edited crops prove as fruitful as the first batch. The primary goal of this new research is to engineer a wider variety of crops that can...

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Saket Navlakha taps the power of biology and computers

Brian Stallard — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 14:00:52 +0000

Associate Professor Saket Navlakha, the newest researcher to join the Simons Center for Quantitative Biology at ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL), focuses his work on what he calls the “algorithms of nature,” which are based on how molecules, cells, and organisms process information to solve problems important to their survival. By learning how the biology...

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CSHL investigators rank among world’s most highly cited

Brian Stallard — Wed, 11 Dec 2019 14:00:14 +0000

Seven researchers affiliated with ��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) have been named among the scientists producing the top 1 percent of the most highly cited research in the world. They join CSHL Professor Michael Wigler, who is listed as one of the most extensively cited researchers of all time. The annual Highly Cited Researchers list...

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Fresh insights into prostate cancer surprise Movember crowd

Brian Stallard — Fri, 22 Nov 2019 22:02:22 +0000

crowd of moustached men and women gathered, beers in hand, at Six Harbors Brewing Co. in Huntington, N.Y. They sported handlebars, pencils, chevrons, and rainbow-colored fu manchus. But this wasn’t some meetup for eccentric moustache aficionados. November is Movemeber, men’s health awareness month, and the crowd gathered to hear Dr. Lloyd Trotman speak about prostate...

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Research profile: Adam Siepel

Brian Stallard — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 15:34:23 +0000

In the mid-1980s, a rural hamlet called West Valley in upstate New York had a 13-year-old guru named Adam Siepel. A surprising number of folks knew who he was, or at least as surprising as that can be in a tight-knit community of just over 500 people. Locals would seek him out to teach them,...

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Vakoc wins Paul Marks Prize for cancer research

Brian Stallard — Tue, 12 Nov 2019 15:13:26 +0000

��ϳԹ��Դ (CSHL) Professor Chris Vakoc has been awarded The Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research in recognition of his significant and ongoing contributions to the understanding of cancer. Presented through Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC), the prize is awarded to up to three young scientists every two years. Vakoc and his...

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Brian Stallard, Author at ���ϳԹ���Դ