Winner of the public vote in the Images of Research competition 2013
Understanding melanoma through colourful fish
Department of Biology & Biochemistry, University of Bath
When the cells that give colour to our skin, called melanocytes, lose their normal stable behaviour and start to grow out of control invading nearby tissues they originate melanoma, one of the most aggressive kinds of cancer. This transformation from healthy to cancerous cell is caused by the aberrant activation of some genes that are only active in the normal melanocyte development in the embryonic stages of the organism. My research aims to understand how the genes regulating normal melanocyte development work in order to understand why their abnormal activation leads to melanoma. For that, I’m using the embryos from a fish called ‘zebrafish’. I stain them with different fluorescent substances to detect the genes involved in normal melanocyte development in order to understand why they work abnormally in melanoma. This will provide us with new targets for treatment.
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In the Images of Research competition, researchers from across the University of Bath have submitted eye-catching images and short narratives which illustrate the breadth of important research taking place at the University and the difference it is making to people’s lives.
My image also have the added feature of augmented reality, meaning that you can use your smart phone or tablet to scan the image and watch videos and other online material. To use it you should download the Aurasma app in your device. Once you’ve installed the app, open your browser in your device and visit http://go.bath.ac.uk/iraura13 to follow the Images of Research channel. Then you only have to scan the image to see the content!
You can have a look at the rest of the entries to the Images of Research 2013 competition here: http://www.bath.ac.uk/research/about/imagesofresearch/2013/index.html
If you are in the Bath area you can see the images and vote for your favourite in a public exhibition this weekend. The exhibition will be on display on Saturday & Sunday (1&2 June) in the Officers’ Club, Stall Street from 11 am until 6 pm as part of the Fringe Arts Bath Festival. So come along and vote for my image!
A structure for the molecule of life
Last Thursday 25th of April, we celebrated the 60th anniversary of the publication of the paper “A structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid” (DNA) by Francis H. Crick and James D. Watson in Nature. This moment is usually referred as the discovery of the DNA structure. The paper describes the DNA molecule structure and suggests the copying mechanisms that it uses when cells divide. I’ll analyse the paper itself and the circumstances around its publication.
One of the things that surprised me when I was reading the paper is that they use openings such as “we wish to suggest”, “in our opinion”, “we believe” or “we wish to put forward”. It made me think that they were two young researchers that have produced a model of the DNA structure and wanted to share it quietly, without producing a lot of noise, like if they were asking for permission. Indeed, when Crick and Watson published their paper they were in their mid-thirties and mid-twenties, respectively, and they were at the beginning of their research career.
Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA
However, although it might seem they were two humble young scientists, they were sure that their model was the right one and they were very conscious of the importance of their model, to the point in which they sound even a bit cocky. In the first paragraphs of the paper they acknowledge other scientists (Pauling and Corey) for sharing their model with them even though it was not still published, but then they say it is “unsatisfactory”, and give several reasons why they think it’s wrong. And in the next paragraph, they say that the model proposed by Fraser is “ill-defined” and they don’t even want to discuss it.
In this paper they don’t publish any data supporting their model. They say that it fits the data that were already available, and that they were going to publish the experimental data to support their model in following papers. The fact that their model was still theoretical might be their reason to use words like “suggest” and “put forward”, instead of using bolder or more specific statements typical of a scientific paper. It surprised me that they managed to publish a paper in Nature (the most famous and prestigious scientific journal) without showing any data. Today you have to show plenty of data to support your hypothesis, and still it is extremely difficult to publish in Nature.
The paper starts very straightforward. It tells the reader what the paper is about in the first sentence: “We wish to suggest a structure for the DNA”. They are very direct and sharp, with short and clear sentences throughout all the paper, which makes it very easy to read and understand. Also the paper is very short: just one side of a page. This is also very different from the way science is written today: the papers usually are very long and they use very long sentences, with a very complex structure that make them sometimes unintelligible.
Although the paper is focussed in the structure of the DNA molecule, which they explain with detail, they also point out that this structure suggest a copying mechanism that they will explain in further publications. That mechanism explains how the genetic information is transmitted from generation to generation.
At the end of the paper they say that they “have been stimulated by the knowledge of” unpublished work from Wilkins and Franklin that Crick and Watson used to formulate their model (not a very clear acknowledgement). However, they are not authors of the paper. Now everybody who contributes to a paper has his name in the author list
The publication of this paper marked the starting point of modern biology. Now, DNA is part of our everyday culture: it’s present in films, in the media, in cosmetics, in the art world… Nevertheless, as every great discovery, it also had some controversy. The polemic is mainly focused in the figure of Rosalind Franklin. Her role was crucial for the DNA structure paper because she was the one producing the X-ray crystallography images that Crick and Watson used to develop their model. However, despite her central role, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Crick, Watson and Wilkins (Franklin’s boss) in 1962. The official reason was that Nobel prizes are only awarded to living people, and unfortunately she died from cancer 6 years earlier. But some people have always suggested that she was treated with inferiority for being a woman.
All in all, Crick and Watson were two very talented researchers, but they discovered the DNA structure by building on the work of many other scientists. Science is always built upon the work of others.
References:
WATSON J.D. & CRICK F.H.C. (1953). Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid, Nature, 171 (4356) 737-738. DOI: 10.1038/171737a0
Sciplexity 