Lab News
- 16/05/2012: A feature article in Cambridge University's 'Research Horizons' magazine describes the recent research carried out in the labs of Shankar Balasubramanian and Steve Jackson and the potential this has for the development of new cancer therapeutics. Original research paper
- 15/05/2012: Congratulations to former graduate student Simon Boulton on his election to the Academy of Medical Sciences. Read the press release here
- 08/05/2012: A new paper has been published in J Cell Science, the culmination of work carried out by Ross Chapman when a postdoc in the lab and continued during his postdoc in Simon Boulton's lab. This work describes the spatial and temporal distribution of BRCA1 and 53BP1 following DNA damage, visualized for the first time at subdiffraction-limit resolution.
- 24/04/2012: Congratulations to former postdoc Fabrizio d'Adda di Fagagna on his election to EMBO Membership.
- 04/03/2012: Former postdoc Sophie Polo has been awarded the Olga Sain prize from the Paris Committee of la Ligue contre le Cancer. This award is presented to young researchers who have made a significant contribution to cancer research. Many congratulations Sophie!
- 27/03/2012: A joint publication between the Jackson lab and Chuna Choudhary's lab in Copenhagen has been published as an advance online publication in Molecular Cell. This paper describes a spectrometry-based proteomics screen designed to analyze global cellular responses to DNA damage. This identified a number of previously unidentified target proteins that were phosphorylated in a DNA damage-dependent manner including proteins involved in the splicing machinery. This work thus highlights the link beteen RNA metabolism and DNA repair.
- 26/03/2012: Following the joint Wellcome Trust/Biochemical Society's meeting last August "From beads on a string to the pearls of regulation: the structure and dynamics of chromatin", Steve Jackson and former postdoc Kyle Miller have written a review on "Histone marks: repairing DNA breaks within the context of chromatin". This and other articles from this meeting have been published in the latest issue of Biochemical Society Transactions
- 08/03/2012: MISSION Therapeutics, the company co-founded by Steve, is the subject of a News Maker article by Ken Garber in this month's Nature Biotechnology. Read the article here
- 27/02/2012: A new joint publication between the Jackson lab and Roger Grand's lab in Birmingham has been published in Molecular Cell. This paper describes the association of hnRNPUL (heterogenoeous nuclear ribonuclearprotein U-like) proteins with the double-strand break sensing complex MRN and discusses their role in the sensing and repair of damaged DNA. Read the full text here
- 24/02/2012: Steve Jackson and Tony Kouzarides are amongst the top 30 most cited authors in European Cancer Research between 1998 and 2009, as reported in Lab Times
- 20/02/2012: Our recent publication in Nature Chemical Biology (see below) has been featured in the journal's News and Views. Read the News and Views article here
- 07/02/2012: A joint publication by the groups of Steve Jackson and Shankar Balasubramanian is published in Nature Chemical Biology today. This work describes a synthetic small molecule (pyridostatin) that targets four-stranded non-Watson-Crick DNA structures to show that such structures can form in the DNA of cancer cells. By targeting such structures we have shown that pyridostatin can inhibit the growth of cancer cells. This work thus paves the way for the development of new approaches to target cancer. Read the full paper here