Less Abstract

Nikki Teran, Laure Frésard, and Nicole Ferraro talk about their work diagnosing rare diseases. We pick apart their abstract to see how they, along with other clinicians and scientists, look at differences between the RNA from patient's and healthy people's blood in order to find out which genes are broken. See the full article at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-019-0457-8

We talk with Dirk Spencer about his recent work at Simon Gilroy’s lab at UW Madison where he helped lead author, Masatusugu Toyota, observe plants reacting to being eaten by caterpillars. Join us as we pick apart their abstract to see how they used fluorescent markers to begin to dissect plant “intelligence”.

We talk with Tess Branon about TurboID, a new tool she developed in Alice Ting's lab at MIT and Stanford University. TurboID can be added to any protein to label what’s around it, letting scientists find out what a protein’s doing by who it’s interacting with — even in whole animals. We pick apart Tess's abstract to see how she used directed evolution to perfect this powerful tool. See the original article at: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.4201

We look at Stanford grad student, Abhiram Rao's study on a gene named PCSK9, which makes a protein involved in cholesterol regulation. We pick apart his abstract to see how he used genomics to show that PCSK9 inhibitor drugs could protect against stroke. See the original article at: www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/CIRCGEN.118.002162