Tribes Of Kendall Square: How To Parse Who's Who In Hotbed Of Biotech
[WBUR CommonHealth]
Of course, as Jeff Krasner explains, a person can belong to more than one tribe. Carey Goldberg sees that intermixing in Richard Young, an MIT biology professor at the Whitehead Institute, who is seeing a big new wave of money lifting up Boston-area biotech.
Drugging Transcription
A scientific event at the Whitehead Institute, October 23, 2017
Hosted by Richard A. Young and Nathanael S. Gray
Super-enhanced
[Nature Reviews Cancer]
Large regulatory elements, termed super-enhancers, promote oncogene transcription in many cancers. Three recent studies have examined various aspects of super-enhancer use in cancer cells.
The Young Lab takes the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge
Up In The Sky! It's Super-Enhancers
[BioTechniques]
Grabbing more transcription factors, occupying more space, and driving mightier gene expression than ordinary regulatory regions--it's super-enhancers. Can these megaregions help us understand stem cells and tumors?
Super-powered switches may decide cell fate
[Nature News]
Cancer cells, stem cells, muscle cells and more may owe their unique identities to powerful gene-regulating structures called super-enhancers, two studies suggest. These structures are long stretches of DNA to which many proteins attach, souping up activity of the genes that they are near.
mRNA Not Equal in All Cells
[The Scientist]
The common belief that cells have similar total amounts of messenger RNA (mRNA)--a notion that underpins researchers' interpretations of global gene expression analyses--is not true, according to a report out this week (October 25) in Cell. Gene expression analysis is now one of the most commonly used methods in biology, and the findings could call into question the interpretation of a broad range of published studies.
The Gang of Four at the Gateway of Life
[The New York Times]
How does an egg cell divide and direct its progeny to turn into each of the many types of cell needed by the adult? Researchers led by Richard A. Young of the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge have been chipping away at this central question in biology.
Transcription Surprise
[The Scientist]
A 2007 Cell paper from Richard Young's lab which took a genome-wide look at transcription initiation in human embryonic stem cells is The Scientist's Hot Paper this month. Data derived from the Science Watch/Hot Papers database and the Web of Science (Thomson ISI) show that Hot Papers are cited 50 to 100 times more often than the average paper of the same type and age.
Sequencing Biology's Hottest, 2002-06
[Science Watch]
Science Watch's survey of high-impact papers in molecular biology and genetics ranked Whitehead Institute among the nation's top for most highly cited papers—awarding the Institute fourth place for total number of citations and 11th place for number of citations per high-impact paper. Science Watch also ranked the high-impact papers by individual authors, placing Whitehead Member Richard Young 12th with 10 papers.
Studies Find Elusive Key to Cell Fate in Embryo
[The New York Times]
The nature of the system that assigns cells their various identities is a central mystery of animal existence, one that takes place at the earliest moments of life when the all-purpose cells of the early embryo are directed to follow different fates.
Analyzing the Circuitry of Stem Cells
[The New York Times]
Scientists at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass., have developed a technique for uncovering the interactions of transcription factors. These are the agents that switch genes on or off in the cell. By figuring out these interactions on a genomewide scale, they have reconstructed the top level of the controls that govern a human embryonic stem cell.
