Gene expression profiles

When Dr. Jakub Abramson was a 14-year-old boy in the former Czechoslovakia, he asked his father what was the best place to do science. His father took the question seriously and, after some consideration, answered “the Weizmann Institute of Dr. Jakub Abramson Science.” Since that day, says Abramson, he knew he was bound for the Institute. “It’s just that the science I was interested in back then involved blowing things up,” he says. Today, Abramson is more interested in exploding the common wisdom about autoimmune diseases. His lab at the Weizmann Institute has produced two new papers –…

A somewhat accidental discovery and random meetings between proteins in a cell: These are the subjects of two new online articles. Each, it its way, involves a technological advance that will, in turn, lead to further scientific discovery. The first involves a partnership between a physics group and a cancer-research group. Among other things, such collaboration is essential for dealing with large data sets - multiple gene expression patterns, for example. When the team made their discovery, they were looking not just at gene expression, but at pieces of genes. More precisely, they were…