Stowers News

KANSAS CITY, MO—Neuroblastoma is a solid tumor cancer that arises in the nervous system outside the brain and spinal cord and is often fatal in children. The tumors are derived from embryonic neural crest cells that fail to properly migrate or mature. It is known that a variety of molecular signals guide these processes in the embryo, but it is unclear how defects in these signals contribute to the disease. Stowers Institute Director of Imaging Paul Kulesa, Ph.D., has received an Innovation Grant from Alex’s Lemonade Stand Foundation to pursue this very question.

KANSAS CITY, MO—The older we get, the less likely we are to hear well, as our inner ear sensory hair cells succumb to age or injury. Intriguingly, humans are one-upped by fish here. Similar hair cells in a fish sensory system that dots their bodies and forms the lateral line, by which they discern water movement, are readily regenerated if damage or death occurs.

KANSAS CITY, MO—If DNA is the cookbook of life, then RNA is the scratch paper where the cell writes down its favorite recipes. These recipes could make the pigments of your skin, the vehicles that carry oxygen through your veins, or the signaling molecules that keep cancer in check. Sometimes, when the cell’s transcription machinery copies these recipes, it stutters or stalls, either because it gets off task or it comes across a problem with the cookbook. Then, the cell has to decide whether to keep going or give up on the recipe.

KANSAS CITY, MO—All the cells in an organism carry the same instruction manual, the DNA, but different cells read and express different portions of it in order to fulfill specific functions in the body. For example, nerve cells express genes that help them send messages to other nerve cells, whereas immune cells express genes that help them make antibodies.

In large part, this highly regulated process of gene expression is what makes us fully functioning, complex beings, rather than a blob of like-minded cells.