Integrated Calendar

Giovanni Blandino, Regina Elena National Intstitute for Cancer Treatment and Research, Rome, Italy
"Mutant p53 protein: an oncogenic regulator of coding and non-coding RNA network in human cancers"
Stefan Wiemann, Division Molecular Genome Analysis, German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany
“Signaling and communication in Cancer”
Gad Getz, Director, Cancer Genome Computational Analysis, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge MA, USA
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The basic unit of scientific publishing — a paper — has not really altered all that much for hundreds of years, but with the rise of the internet, how is this changing? This talk will look at different aspects of communicating chemistry in the modern (and more connected) world — through traditional methods such as journals (and all that entails, including a behind-the-scenes look at Nature Chemistry’s editorial processes), but also using ‘new’ media such as blogs and Twitter. Other considerations, such as metrics (alternative metrics (so-called altmetrics), article-level metrics and impact factors) will also be discussed.

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Malaria is one of the most devastating infectious diseases in humans, with over 450,000 deaths caused by Plasmodium falciparum (Pf) parasites each year. These pathogens face a very hostile environment during their complex life cycle and have to develop means to escape and alter their hosts' response.
Here we show that while growing within human red blood cells, the parasites secrete exosomes (nano-vesicles) containing Pf-DNA. These vesicles are taken up by human monocytes and the DNA species are released within the host cytosol leading to cytosolic STING-dependent DNA sensing. This may represent a decoy mechanism developed by the parasites and employed from a distance to promote their infection.

The neural network of the retina processes the stream of visual signals falling onto the eye. When a visual image is presented to the retina, retinal ganglion cells, which form the output of this network, encode changes in local visual contrast inside their receptive fields. In natural vision, however, images do not arrive in isolation, but are structured in rapid sequences, separated by frequent saccades, which activate some types of ganglion cells and suppress others. Yet, little is known about how the rapid succession of images induced by saccades affects the encoding of spatial visual information. We found that a specific type of retinal ganglion cells, recorded in mouse retina, displays unexpected responses to saccade-like image transitions; the cells elicit a distinct spike burst when the same visual pattern reappears after the transition, providing a special code for such transitions or image parts that lead to a recurrence of stimulus patterns. This sensitivity to image recurrence is mediated by a circuit of serial inhibition, allowing a rapid reappearance of the image to suppress transition-induced inhibition of the ganglion cell. Our results show that saccade-like image transitions trigger interactions in the complex inhibitory network of the retina that lead to a dynamical gating of the information flow through the retina and provide a mode of operation that differs from the processing of simple, standard laboratory stimuli.