Many forms of blood cancer can be traced back to defects in the basic housekeeping processes in our cells' maturation.
- Alan Warren
The researchers studied tiny protein-producing factories, called ribosomes, isolated from cells. They capitalised on improvements made at the LMB to a high-powered imaging technique known as single particle cryo-electron microscopy.
The microscopes, capable of achieving detail near to the atomic level, enabled the team to link the molecular origins of a rare inherited leukaemia predisposition disorder, ‘Shwachman-Diamond Syndrome’ and a more common form of acute leukaemia to a common pathway involved in the construction of ribosomes.
The research, funded by the blood cancer charity Bloodwise and the Medical Research Council (MRC), is published online in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology. -
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Image:A Surprising New Path to Tumor Development
Credit: PLoS Biology
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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