Welcome to Our Blog
Thank you for visiting our website. We are a relatively small lab with big ideas. We are part of a much larger group of investigators known collectively as the LLUMC Molecular Radiation Biology Laboratories. It is our hope that this website will educate, communicate, and incite scientific debate. As the PI of our little group, I hope to post our data and discuss potential mechanisms, consequences, and countermeasures. With a bit of luck we'll all learn something. The links to the left include our merry band as well as collaborating investigators and laboratories. The links to the right include our archive and blogroll. The banner above will always bring you back to the main page page. Take a look around and please feel free to leave a comment on our blog (try to keep it civil and constructive) or shoot us an e-mail. - Michael " Ubertramp " Pecaut
It’s a good day to start a blog…
Posted by: Ubertramp on 2008.05.24
Categories & Tags: Current Events,Introduction,Props
Comments: None
Hello everyone. This is my first real entry to this blog. I’m hoping for good things with this, but we’ll see how it goes. It will quickly become obvious that I’m a relative newbie. Anyway. A quick look around the site and you’ll see that we have a lot going on.
On May 27, Farnaz will be representing out lab at the annual meeting of the Psychoneuroimmunology Research Society (PNIRS) in Madison, WI. Farnaz will be presenting a poster describing some of our results from a recent space shuttle experiment (STS-118). She’s pretty excited about going as this will be the first time we have presented this work to an international audience. We’ve already presented some of it locally, at
When she returns, we’re hoping to run our latest set of experiments for her dissertation work. These will involve the effects of proton radiation on CNS-Immune communication and phagocytic function. She is focusing on sympathetic nervous system pathways with an emphasis on the local microenvironment in the spleen. She will characterize cFOS expression in the hypothalamus, beta-adrenergic receptor and cAMP expression in splenocytes (both macrophages and T cells) and, finally, circulating catecholamine and inflammatory cytokine expression. This is on top of scheduling beam time and getting all of us organized. I don’t think she realizes yet how much work she has ahead of her, but she’ll find out soon enough. Hehehe.
This summer, we will continue our low-dose/low-dose-rate experiments. And, more than likely, continue our running debate about hormesis. There is a growing body of evidence which seems to suggest that very low doses of radiation are actually protective, in terms of the likelihood of cancer induction after a subsequent exposure to a higher dose of radiation. This is probably because low doses of radiation increase reactive oxygen species (ROS) and anti-oxidant expression. However, I’m still not so sure this is a good thing for anything other than immune surveillance for malignancies. I believe this hormetic response has a “dark side.” Namely, the increase in ROS will also result in an increase in anti-inflammatory responses. This, in turn, will result in a decrease in the ability to respond to an immune challenge from an external source, such as bacteria.
Well that’s it for now. Hope this is of interest to some of you and look forward to hearing from everyone as we go.
