p53 and the sea

The 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne, Australia, closed today, but not before p53 competed with the scenery for scientists' attention. Just as the linkurl:Keystone Symposia;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/23090/ are set up to allow for skiing in the afternoon, Lorne is set up to nice long break in the middle of the day during which delegates play tennis on grass courts, swim at the sweeping beach across the road or just laze on the grass in the sun. Tony Brai

Written byStephen Pincock
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The 18th Lorne Cancer Conference Erskine on the Beach in Lorne, Australia, closed today, but not before p53 competed with the scenery for scientists' attention. Just as the linkurl:Keystone Symposia;http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/23090/ are set up to allow for skiing in the afternoon, Lorne is set up to nice long break in the middle of the day during which delegates play tennis on grass courts, swim at the sweeping beach across the road or just laze on the grass in the sun. Tony Braithwaite, from the University of Otago, in New Zealand, reported on efforts to figure out the role of p53's N-terminal polyproline domain in apoptosis. Looking at mice with a homozygous deletion in the proline rich region showed that they showed no evidence of spontaneous tumor formation. 'Either apoptosis is not the critical determiner of tumor suppression by p53,' he said, 'or the polyproline domain is not essential for apoptosis.' The schedule included an international cast of speakers on cancer genetics and epigenetics, including Carlo M. Croce, chairman of the College of Medicine and Public Health at Ohio State University, who described some of the work his group has done in elucidating the relationship between specific micro RNA expression signatures and prognosis in chronic lymphocytic leukemia. Gerard Evan from the UCSF Comprehensive Cancer Center described his very useful knock-in mouse model in which the regular p53 gene is replaced by one that encodes an ectopically and reversibly switchable p53ER/TAM protein. Simply by administering a ligand, the mice can be switched between p53 null and wild type, allowing Evan's group to examine when, where and how p53 functions in vivo to suppress neoplasia.
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