If the soles of your shoes say something about where you’re going, the footprint of a cell can give clues about cancer. This idea of tracking something small, like a molecular footprint, to understand something big, like cancer progression, is the theme of a Saturday special interest subgroup at the 2014 ASCB/IFCB meeting in Philadelphia on December 6.
The 1:00 pm session, “Spanning Scales (Nano to Macro): Understanding Bigger Things in Biology by Looking at the Smaller Things,” was organized by Jim and Cathy Galbraith, both professors at Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU) and long time ASCB members. The Galbraiths are married but work as independent investigators who sometimes collaborate. They are both interested in superresolution microscopy and molecular footprints.
“We look at single adhesion receptor molecules and see how the cell is going to move. Before superresolution microscopy, we could look in a microscope and see it move, and only wonder how it did that,” Jim Galbraith said. “If you look at the bottoms of your shoe and of my shoe the patterns will probably be different. I think cells have the same kind of signatures, because some cells move in different ways or different places. Just like if you go out in the ice and snow, you’ll have different soles on your shoes than if you’re going to go dancing,” he explained.
The Galbraiths hope this information will help them better understand diseases. For example, Jim Galbraith points out that, “Cancer cells don’t respect boundaries. Other cells stay put. Cancer is so dangerous because the cells move everywhere. If we can look at the molecules and say these molecules behave differently in these cancer cells, maybe we can begin a targeted therapeutic intervention.”
One of the challenges they face with superresolution imaging inspired them to organize this subgroup, according to Cathy Galbraith. “How do you interpret a million dots in an individual cell? We’re hoping that that will be expanded on to some extent in the session,” she said. “Basically you’re getting better resolution, but are you getting better information? With this additional resolution, you have to always be able to relate it back to the bigger picture,” Jim Galbraith said.
“We asked people to participate who used multidisciplinary techniques across different time and space domains,” Cathy Galbraith said. “For example, Gleb Stengel is looking at whether superresolution imaging can correlate with electron microscopy… Michael Reiser is recording electrical signals and relating that back to animal behavior,” she added.
“We’re all very focused on our individual research area, and I think we have to always remember that it’s part of a bigger system, and we have to start dealing with those bigger pictures. As we get more and more data intensive we can lose sight of that bigger picture,” Jim Galbraith said.
The Galbraiths are making different footprints these days. They’re sporting new waterproof shoes following their recent move from the NIH in Bethesda, MD, to OHSU in Portland, OR. “I’m looking out the window at rain. Probably any time you call between October and March I can say that,” Jim Galbraith said.
About the Author:
Christina Szalinski is a science writer with a PhD in Cell Biology from the University of Pittsburgh.
