The summer is ending and it’s time to plan autumn and winter activities. In particular, this period is important to chose the conferences and meetings to attend next year. Indeed, after collecting and elaborating the data, it’s really important to share them to the scientific community, and a great opportunity is given by symposia and conferences. In this context, scientists usually show preliminary data about their work through poster or oral presentation. However, they might to submit an abstract to scientific committee in order to present their work.

The human bronchial epithelial cells have been recently used to investigate the expression of Toll like receptor 9, after the induction by lipopolysaccharide. This receptor has a transmembrane structure and signals though MAPK and IKK pathway, at last instance. It is involved in the innate immune response: indeed, it recognizes the molecules shared by pathogen, as different from the host ones and generates a response. Firstly, IL2 and IL18 are produced in antigen presenting cells, and these cytokines induce the maturation of naïve T cells.

Pfam is a novel database that contains conserved proteins and domains, usually employed in proteome analyses or sequencing classification. In this database, proteins are classified into two groups: Pfam-A families are manually annotated and inserted into the database after overcoming strictly threshold, while Pfam-B families are automatically created and clustered through similar sequence regions not matched with Pfam-A.

   Basal cell carcinoma (BCC) is the most diffused tumor among the Caucasian population. Its more frequent in men than in women and usually arises in the fifth decade. BCC involves keratinocytes and keratinocyte stem cells that are present in the epidermis and in the follicular hair. These cells acquire some genetic mutations, generating the transforming phenotype. Based on the current data available in literature, it is not totally understood which genomic alterations are crucial for BCC development. By contrast, multiple genes seem altered in this kind of cancer.

A recent survey of millions of sequencing products demonstrated that the occurrence of RNA and DNA editing in human and mouse genome is higher than previously documented. Indeed, while the RNA editing has been identified in several model organisms as well as in human, the DNA editing has been reported only in viruses and mice –through retrotransposons- but not in human genome. Scientists of the Harvard University collected the raw sequences from the National Center for Biotechnology Information Trace Archive and aligned them.

The imaging techniques have done important advances and fine cell details have been resolved with high definition. Anyway, the study of certain processes or surfaces is sometimes limited because of the requirement of gold coat or permeabilization treatment that disrupt cells and organelles. At the California Institute of Technology a novel kind of microscopy has been set up.

The binary expression system is a strategy to finely tune the tragene expression in a model organism. One example of this kind of system is the GAL4- UAS in which the GAL4 gene is under control of the promoter of interest. GAL 4 activates a second exogenous gene bearing the upstream activating sequence. A possible alternative to the GAL 4- UAS system is the Q system. In this case the transcriptional activator QF binds to a specific sequence Q- UAS, as well as its repressor QS.

The reprogramming of somatic cell is a difficult process and the very low rate of success is the challenge that scientists must overcome. Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute set up a live cell imaging system to follow the differentiation process step by step. They used mouse fibroblast as a model. These cells had been previously transduced with viruses carrying the expression of Oct4, Sox2, c-Myc and Nanog under control of doxycycline. In order to recognize specific lineage during reprogramming, scientists introduced also a doxycycline- inducible fluorescent protein.

A team of psychologists of the University of Princeton demonstrated that speaker and listener activate the same neuronal areas during a conversation. The brain area involved in speaking is the Broca’s area, while a speech is completely understood in the Wernicke’s area. Thus, in principle the areas of brain involved in a conversation may be different between speaker and listener.

   siRNA is a gene-regulatory mechanism triggered by dsRNAs. siRNAs which consist of duplexes of 21-23nt RNAs that are base paired with 2-nt 3’ overhangs and is complementary to target mRNA, mimic intermediates of the natural processing of longer double-stranded RNA triggers by RNA-polymerase III.