Oncogene roles in moles

The paper:

C. Michaloglou et al., "BRAFE600-associated senescence-like cell cycle arrest of human naevi," Nature, 436:720-4, 2005. (Cited in 92 papers)

The finding:

Two groups of researchers from the Netherlands teamed up with US colleagues to show that the introduction of oncogene BRAFE600 induced cell-cycle arrest in human mole cells in vivo.

The significance:

In vitro work had shown that, under certain conditions, oncogenes signal strong cell-growth arrest. Until this paper, an in vivo correlate had not been demonstrated. Moreover, telomere shortening previously was assumed to be the mechanism. The researchers ruled out telomere degradation-induced senescence by comparing telomere length in mole cells and melanoma metastases using fluorescent in situ hybridization - the naevus showed no significantly shortened telomeres.

The next step:

To further uncover why certain mole cells escape senescence, one of the paper?s senior authors, Daniel Peeper, at...