Name: UOQ's breakthrough to ensure your cells aren't the boss of you
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UOQ's breakthrough to ensure your cells aren't the boss of you

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The research breakthrough to ensure your cells aren’t the boss of youWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementUniversity of Queensland researchers have identified for the first time which genes are "in charge" of decision making in cells, with implications for everything from stopping disease in its tracks to helping animals deal with climate change.All genes have a purpose in an organism, and some genes have evolved into the role of "boss", telling other genes when to switch on and off, especially when under stress.Scientists from UQ’s Institute for Molecular Bioscience have managed to isolate a number of these "boss" genes by looking for common markers across a number of different cell types."Our body has hundreds of different cell types and they all operate a little differently," lead researcher Dr Nathan Palpant said."One of the ways we found [these boss genes] is by sampling all of those hundreds of different cell types across millions of points of data to distil out all the noise and leave us with just the genes that are driving decisions in cells."Dr Palpant said although the "boss" genes are in charge of how the cells react to external stimulus, they don’t always make the right decisions."As an example – if someone has a heart attack, there is a decision that cells make that are actually bad, and it makes the heart perform poorly and that causes heart failure," he said."If we can find the decision-making genes, it points us towards strategies for finding a way of blocking those adverse responses."Now that they have identified the controlling genes in cells, Dr Palpant said they can investigate how to control those genes in turn, potentially letting doctors turn off harmful processes.Advertisement"It gives us a lot of opportunity to examine how cells respond to stresses. For example if someone’s having a heart attack or even aquatic animals when they’re responding to stresses like global warming," he said."If we can understand how these genes are responding to those stresses we can potentially intervene in those circumstances.""Having a better understanding of how cells work will boost human health, agriculture, ecology, marine biology, and many fields that are dependent on understanding how cells make decisions based on a changing and sometimes stressful environment."Associate Professor Mikael Boden said they found that the commonalities of the “boss” cells meant that they would have evolved early, meaning there were common control cells across a range of animals."This discovery has far-reaching implications because it can help us understand how cells respond to heart attacks and how aquatic animals respond to global warming, among many other issues."The researchers used sea squirts for their direct research, showing how the animals’ muscle cells arrange themselves differently after instructions from the control gene.The research has been published in the journal .Log in, or to save articles for later. covers health, science and technology for the Brisbane Times.Advertisement

The research breakthrough to ensure your cells aren’t the boss of youWe’re sorry, this feature is currently unavailable. We’re working to restore it. Please try again later.DismisscloseAdvertisementBy Log in, or to save articles for later.Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeAdvertisementUniversity of Queensland researchers have identified for the first time which genes are "in charge" of decision making in cells, with implications for everything from stopping disease in its tracks to helping animals deal with climate change.All genes have a purpose in an organism, and some...

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UOQ's breakthrough to ensure your cells aren't the boss of you

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