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RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT:
Select Honors and Publications*
PUBLICATIONS
Bruce Appel, PhD, Professor, Pediatrics, recently published a paper in Genes and Development that overturns a longstanding dogma about the origin of motor neurons and oligodendrocytes, the myelinating cell type of the brain. Dr. Appel showed that these cells do not arise from a common stem cell as previously thought, but rather from different origins in the developing nervous system. This work has implications for methods that aim to produce motor neurons or oligodendrocytes from induced pluripotent cells for therapeutic use.
Kristin Artinger, PhD, Associate Professor of Craniofacial Biology, School of Dental Medicine, published a report in the journal Developmental Biology using live imaging to demonstrate the mechanism responsible for the migration of neural crest cells during the development of zebrafish. This study reveals a novel role for the putative Sonic hedgehog receptor and cell adhesion regulator, cdon, in zebrafish neural crest migration. Understanding the mechanisms that regulate normal neural crest cell migration during development may provide insight into the causes of craniofacial birth defects, as well as the abnormal migration of cancer cells in melanoma.
Kathrin Bernt, MD, and Tobias Neff, MD, Assistant Professors of Pediatrics, Division of Hematology, Oncology & Bone Marrow Transplantation, have a paper that was accepted for publication in The Journal of Clinical Investigation reporting that high levels of Meningiona-1 (MN1) cooperate with the normal form of the histone methyltransferases, MLL1, to transform bone marrow cells into leukemia cells. High levels of MN1 are associated with the poor survival of acute myeloid leukemia patients, with almost 80% dying within two to three years. This study demonstrates that MN1 leukemia cells respond to a new class of drugs that was developed to treat MLL1-mutant leukemias and represents an important step toward new therapies for a group of patients for whom conventional approaches offer little chance of cure.
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