Student recognized in Nature Cell
Biology
by
Heather WoolwinePublic Relations
It’s no secret to MUSC students, faculty, and staff that Yair Adereth, Ph.D., represents the best of basic science; he did win the overall first place award during last year’s Student Research Day.
Dr. Yair Adereth in
the lab.Now, a national audience will see his research talent as they read from the pages of December’s Nature Cell Biology. It’s there that Adereth’s study of the biological and clinical significance of a protein involved in cancer cell growth breaks a gene regulation mechanism paradigm, according to his advisor, Tien Hsu, Ph.D., Pathology and Lab Medicine associate professor.
“As far as I can gather, this is the highest impact publication by an MUSC student in years,” Hsu said.
What made Adereth’s research unique was his approach to cancer cell gene regulation and expression. “We identified a gene that is differentially expressed in many tumors. Usually when people refer to regulation of expression, they are talking about it at the pre-transcript or transcript level, there is less emphasis on post-transcript levels,” Adereth said. “We looked more at the post-transcript level.”
Transcription means constructing a messenger RNA molecule using a DNA molecule as a template with the resulting transfer of genetic information to the messenger RNA.
“What we found in post-transcription was that the cell has a means of regulating the expression of specific sets of proteins, or proteins targeted at specific sites where expression is needed,” Adereth said. “MLP-1 is a protein with a noted pattern of expression in normal cells, but in cancer cells the pattern of expression is very different,” Hsu said. “We first found that MLP-1 regulates expression of integrin, a critical protein involved in metastasis. But things just didn’t fit; the gene expressions of the integrin we studied didn’t fit the traditional research dogma. That’s when it was learned that the local protein expression for integrin was helped by MLP-1 to first localize RNA, which goes against what we know about traditional gene expression.”
Adereth’s discovery is important because identifying a gene with different expressions that helps tumor progression means scientists stand poised to learn much more about the later steps of cancer like metastasis and cell migration. “We have perhaps found a mechanism that gives cancer cells an advantage by rendering them more mobile,” Adereth said. “But we are still years away from any clinical applications.”
For now, Adereth will begin work in January as research director for a local biotechnology company, Cure Source. There he will direct research and work with cord blood-derived stem cells.
Adereth graduated with bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biological sciences and cell research and immunology, respectively, from Tel-Aviv University in Israel. A native of Haifa, Israel, Adereth recently earned his doctorate in molecular and cellular biology and pathobiology from MUSC. He received numerous honors and awards in the last several years, as well as presented and published on topics related to gene expression and proteins and their relation to cancer.
To see the full article by Adereth, visit http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ncb1335.html.
Friday, Dec. 2, 2005
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