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New Discovery Provides Clue to Cancer Growth
A group of international scientists reveal myosin-1 is responsible for DNA transcription.
By Debra Gordon
for Office.com
Nov. 3, 2000
Researchers have been busy exploring how to inactivate cancer cells on a molecular level to avoid exposing patients with cancer to harsh chemotherapeutic regimens designed to destroy cells. Is this the beginning of a definitive cure for cancer?
A group of international scientists, led by Primal de Lanerolle, Ph.D., professor of physiology and biophysics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, discovered the existence of a new form of the molecule myosin-1. Myosin-1 is critical in the transcription of DNA into RNA which is then used to make the proteins fundamental to the functions of the cell.
Their work, published in the Oct. 13 issue of the journal Science, is the first demonstration of a molecular motor in the nucleus.
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"This discovery offers an eye-opening insight into the mechanical actions that are required to express genes," says Kathy Wilson, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md.
"If they really demonstrate in the future that myosin has an effect on transcription, certainly, it has the potential to be very exciting," says Robert Adelstein, M.D., chief of the laboratory of molecular biology at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md. "It becomes another understanding about how to up-regulate or down-regulate transcription, which is a way of making genes active or inactive."
Myosin, found in the cytoplasm of nearly every cell, is responsible for directing the movement and division of cells. And every action from the beating of our hearts to the drawing of oxygen into our lungs to the power involved in running is guided by this protein.
The protein was discovered in muscle cells in the 1920s, and, since then, various forms have been identified. Yet, for years, scientists have searched fruitlessly for some form of myosin in the nucleus of cells, hypothesizing that it must exist to aid in the cumbersome transcription process.
Next page: The serendipitous discovery of myosin-1's role in transcription
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