Any given Sunday

Posted 02:09 PM, March 11, 2007, by thomas.tsai

The weather is gorgeous outside, but I find myself sitting at my bench in lab.

Besides school, I spent quite a bit of time in lab. I've been working with Dr. Karl Sylvester, a pediatric surgeon, since February of last year. The research we do is on Wnt signalling in oval cells, which are adult liver stem cells. These cells, which are near and dear to my heart, are bipotential--meaning the can become either hepatocytes or cholangiocytes, and thus they express markers for both.

The main approach we take is exposing mice to either acute or chronic injury. If you guys paid attention in your English and Lit classes in grade school, you'll remember the story of Prometheus. A rather nice chap, Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to Man. The Greek gods being the rather selfish bunch that they are, got rather upset and chained our protagonist Prometheus to a rock. Each day a vulture would fly to the rock and peck away at his liver. Fortunately, his liver would grow back every night. Unfortunately, the vulture would be there again the next morning.

Long story short, the liver is the only solid organ that can regenerate. The theory is that in response to acute injury the hepatocytes proliferate and hypertrophy. However, in cases of chronic injury where there is damage to the extant hepatocytes, oval cells become a transient population of proliferative cells that can help to reconstitute the liver. Our lab studies the role of beta-catenin in that proliferative response, with the hypothesis that pertubations to beta-catenin signalling in oval cells may be responsible for liver cancer.

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The liver happens to be my favorite organ--afterall it is the unsung hero of the body. I've been doing research since high school, starting at M.D. Anderson with my initial projects on minimal residual disease detection of ALL with PCR and cancer gene expression profiling using cDNA microarrays (back then microarrays were still fairly novel).

Enough reminiscing--I spent the day checking on my little cells growing in soft agar. Watching the cells does not make them grow faster. I also ran some gels for a PCR I did a week ago. It's tough scheduling lab in between classes, meetings, and such. What normally would take a few hours during the summer, ends up taking a week to do during term time.

tom lab small.jpg