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Welcome
Happy New Year! I am pleased to share that Salk is off to a great start in 2017, in the lab and beyond the bench.
There is just a little over a week left to see the Louis Kahn exhibition at the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park. Here at the Institute, we've got just four more concerts in this season's Salk Science & Music series, and the most recent installment of our Salk Talk podcast features an interview with staff scientist Abby Buchwalter.
Please read on for more information.
Yours in Discovery,
Elizabeth Blackburn
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Buzz for The Telomere Effect
Released earlier this month, The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Salk President Elizabeth Blackburn and health psychologist Elissa Epel has garnered significant media attention and landed on The New York Times Best Seller list.
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Curb your immune enthusiasm
Axel Nimmerjahn discovers that inhibiting a protein called phospholipid scramblase 1 (PLSCR1) controls a cell's antiviral response, providing long-term protection from immune attack for therapeutic viruses as well as preventing excessive inflammation. The work appears in Neuron on January 19, 2017.
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Pancreatic tumors rely on signals from surrounding cells
Ron Evans and his lab have pinned down how signals from the microenvironment encourage pancreatic tumors to grow by altering their metabolism. The team reported its findings --- that blocking the pathways involved can slow the growth of pancreatic cancer --- in the journal PNAS the week of January 16, 2017.
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Salk scientists crack the structure of HIV machinery
Dmitry Lyumkis's team has solved the atomic structure of a key piece of machinery that allows HIV to integrate into human host DNA and replicate in the body. The findings appear January 6, 2017, in Science and yield structural clues informing the development of new HIV drugs.
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Worms have teenage ambivalence, too
In a new study detailed in eNeuro in January 2017, Shrek Chalasani suggests that, in both worms and humans, adolescent brains mature to stable adult brains by changing which brain cells they use to generate behavior. The discovery provides insight into the underlying drivers of neurological development that could help better understand the human brain and disease.
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Joe Ecker and collaborators studied a 3D "mini-brain" grown from human stem cells and found it to be structurally and functionally more similar to real brains than the 2D models in widespread use. The discovery, appearing in the December 20, 2016, issue of Cell Reports, indicates that the new model could better help scientists understand brain development as well as neurological diseases.
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Did you know? Salk has podcasts
Abby Buchwalter, staff scientist in Martin Hetzer's lab, is profiled in the latest
Salk Talk podcast. Produced by Margot Wohl, all the interviews shine the spotlight on Salk researchers whose efforts advance scientific discovery and whose personalities enrich the scientific community
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The Salk Science & Music Series continues its fourth season with a concert by cellist Amit Peled at 4:00 p.m., Sunday, January 22, in the Conrad T. Prebys Auditorium.
Peled is known for breaking down the traditional barriers between performer and audience, making classical music more accessible. He plays Pablo Casals' 1733 Gofriller cello.
Click here to read a Q and A with Amit Peled in The New York Times. Comprising the science component of the afternoon, Salk Assistant Professor
Kenta Asahina
of the Molecular Neurobiology Laboratory will discuss his research.
- January 22, 2017 - Amit Peled with Kenta Asahina
- February 12, 2017 - Sean Chen & Karen Joy Davis with Saket Navlakha
- March 12, 2017 - Zlata Chochieva with Eiman Azim
- April 30, 2017 - Helen Sung Quartet with Nicola Allen
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Louis Kahn - The power of architecture
The San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park is featuring the first retrospective in two decades of Salk architect Louis Kahn's work, featuring more than 200 objects related to his buildings and projects. On display through January 31, 2017.
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Download some amazing Salk Science images for your smartphone, tablet or desktop.
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Salk Institute scientists discover how Immune receptors use a protein called ZAP70 to amplify "invader" signals and attack a biological intruder. Single molecule tracks of Zap70 overlaid with T cell receptor microclusters shows signal transfer at early moments of T cell activation. Courtesy of the Lillemeier lab.
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