Stem cell researchers face down stem cell tourism

sea-maid submitted, created time 6 months 4 weeks (www.nature.com)

"Stem cell tourism," in which people travel thousands of miles and pay thousands of dollars to receive unregulated care, is nothing new. Now, with more stem cell applications being pushed toward clinical trials, the international research community is stepping up.

Although some of the patients report positive results, the fact that they cannot describe their treatments in detail--or produce verifiable medical records--severely limits the research value (though not the human value) of their cases

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Protein quality control in the early secretory pathway

sea-maid submitted, created time 7 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

The aim of this study is to discuss protein quality control in the early secretory pathway. From the abstract of this article, we know secretory proteins are scrutinized at the endoplasmic reticulum (ER)–Golgi interface.

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Analysis of δ32 mutants defective in chaperone-mediated feedback control reveals unexpected complexity of the heat shock response

sumsung submitted, created time 1 year 2 months (www.pnas.org)

Protein quality control is accomplished by inducing chaperones and proteases in response to an altered cellular folding state. In Escherichia coli, expression of chaperones and proteases is positively regulated by δ32.

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Role of purine-rich exonic splicing enhancers in nuclear retention of pre-mRNAs

jiangyun submitted, created time 1 year 4 months (www.pnas.org)

Intron-containing pre-mRNAs are normally retained in the nucleus until they are spliced to produce mature mRNAs that are exported to the cytoplasm. Although the detailed mechanism is not well understood, the formation of splicing-related complexes on pre-mRNAs is thought to be responsible for the nuclear retention. Therefore, pre-mRNAs containing suboptimal splice sites should tend to leak out to the cytoplasm. Such pre-mRNAs often contain purine-rich exonic splicing enhancers (ESEs) that stimulate splicing of the adjacent intron

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