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Evaluating Non-Conventional Treatments for Glaucoma: A Review Article
In the summer of 2001, the Canadian federal government amended the Narcotic Control Regulations to allow the Marijuana Medical Access Regulations to come into force. The new legislation allowed for the use of marijuana by patients suffering from serious illnesses in cases where it was expected to have clinical benefits that outweighed potential risks. Cannabis helps ...
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The homologous origin of analogous structures: A tale of an eye for an eye in evolutionary biology
That same old analogy-homology dichotomy. Evolutionary biologists, like good historians, do not stop at merely describing events that happened hundreds of millions of years ago. Instead, they try and learn from the past, in a very human attempt to come to grasps with our present and have a shot at predicting certain aspects of the ...
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Stem Cells – Hope or Hype for Reproductive and Regenerative Medicine?
A stem cell (SC) is a cell from an embryo or adult that can self-renew and differentiate into specialized cells such as neurons, skin or muscle. Embryonic stem (ES) cells are considered to be “blank slates” as they typically exhibit little or no differentiation, and are considered to have more therapeutic potential than adult SCs. ...
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Secondary First! Slightly altering your immunoblotting protocol could resolve issues of non-specific background ‘noise’
Standard protocols for resolving proteins by SDSPAGE electrophoresis followed by Western blotting are pretty straightforward. In general, after running an SDSPAGE gel and transferring separated proteins to a solid membrane, the membrane is incubated with a primary antibody that binds specifically to a particular protein. After a few short washes, a Secondary antibody is added which is both specific to ...
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Inhibition of SRC kinase activity does not restore sensitivity to anoikis in Ras-transformed intestinal epithelial cells
The intestinal epithelial cells (IECs) lining the lumen of the colon are normally attached to a complex matrix of proteins known as the Basement Membrane (BM). When this attachment to the BM is lost or prevented, normal IECs will undergo apoptosis (or “cell suicide”), in a process known as anoikis (in ancient Greek, “homelessness”) (1). ...
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Stamp-Collecting in the Post-”Omic” Playground
“My own scientific career was a descent from higher to lower dimension, led by the desire to understand life. I went from animals to cells, from cells to bacteria, from bacteria to molecules, from molecules to electrons. The story had its irony, for molecules and electrons have no life at all. On my way life ran out between my fingers.” ...
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p53: guardian of multicellularity? A short essay on multicellular evolution and p53
p53 is a well known tumour suppressor gene. What we know about p53 and other similar genes, for that matter, no matter how independent the information may be, is always put in the context of disease. This is so common that it is almost impossible to think of genes like p53 out of the context ...
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Blinded by Random Variables
It is seldom possible to make two separate measurements of the same physical system that give exactly identical results. Any measurement can be considered a random variable (RV), which has a mean value and a standard deviation, or error. The square of the error is called the variance. In physics and biology measurements are usually ...
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“I’ll see your GCAT and raise you a TGAC”, Commodification in Biological Research
The discipline of ‘research bioethics’ exists in large part to recognize and protect the rights of subjects of biomedical research and experimentation. In doing so, it faces a number of challenges presented by competing interests in research, including the unending desire for scientific progress and the urgency inherent in the quest for medical breakthroughs. When one ...
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Ontario’s Private For-Profit MRI and CT Scanners: Saviour or Scourge?
The newly expired Progressive Conservative Government had taken steps to ameliorate the disparity in MRI and CT diagnostic services between Northern and Southern Ontario by going private. To follow are some of the details associated with the private sector bidding procedure, its outcome, and scandalous details consistent with political corruption. According to statistics from a ...
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Pilfering the Public Purse for Private Profit
Fundraising season is upon us again. With the Terry Fox Run, the CIBC Run for the Cure and the CN Tower stair climb on the horizon, the public mind once again turns to the importance of funding research to cure our ills. It is clear from the prominence of these events that there is considerable ...
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The Impact of Impact
It happened to us again last week: that dreaded letter from the high impact journal, “While we recognize that your work is of the highest quality, we feel that it is not of sufficiently broad interest for our general readership.” Who are these “general readers” and why aren’t they interested in our work? This spawned ...
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A Word About Hypothesis
It is with great pleasure that we introduce the inaugural issue of Hypothesis, a peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the sharing and discussion of novel, interdisciplinary research and ideas within the University of Toronto community. The present time is an extremely exciting era for science. The availability of numerous genome sequences and our growing ability to gather ...