I promise I'll get around to posting about other things here soon. Okay, maybe promise is too strong of a word. I do seem to be falling into the habit of writing shorter posts, and those tend to go onto G+ and/or Facebook. Alas. I've found myself missing the LJ community recently, the longer posts and the community of people in my friends lists. I'm planning on spending some more of my time here, though it may have to be once-a-week catch up sessions.
In the meantime, my job continues to produce fascinating articles! (These weren't all posted on the same day though....)
Annual Review of Pharmacology and Toxicology Volume 54 For me, one of the wonders of pharmacology is how we use toxins and poisons as medicine. Titles such as Masuyer's "Engineered Botulinum Neurotoxins as New Therapeutics" still take me by surprise sometimes. Of course most people are familiar with this toxin from the coverage of Botox injections (which is /even stranger/ to me.) I liked the way this article goes into some of the history of how the toxin was discovered and the different strains that are common around us. I had known a little about it, but wasn't expecting the vast
numbers of strains that are available!
On the other hand of surprise - I'm always disappointed to discover how little we know about certain things. For example, Ke's article "Pharmocometrics in Pregnancy: An Unmet Need." Very little drug development research includes pregnant women - for obvious reasons really. Nobody wants to administer a drug when it could potentially harm a child! The down side is that we have very little information about how medicine and over-the-counter treatments can affect pregnant women. One reaction is to simply stop taking medication of course, but as the introduction for the article rightly points out: " cessation of drug therapy during pregnancy for the treatment of serious clinical conditions is not possible as it may be detrimental to the health and well-being of the pregnant woman and therefore her fetus."
So those two articles are on my reading list!
Another article that struck my fancy was Horn's "Antiparasitic Chemotherapy: From Genomes to Mechanisms." Chemo for parasites? That seems a bit extreme to me. But my skim of the article revealed that it's focused on malaria and sleeping sickness. Was I the only one who never realized that malaria was caused by a parasite? Dude. With that information in hand, it was a fabulously interesting (and slightly horrifying) article. As a side note, after reading through Pharmtox, I now feel like a pathetic whiner for complaining about my
cold.
Next up is Entomology! On to the bugs!
Annual Review of Entomology Volume 59 This may seem a bit too self-evident, but just in case I like to issue this warning...the figures in entomology contain images of bugs and spiders. While proofing Ento I would often find myself returning to it and being slightly startled by the large bug on my screen. That may just be me though. I'm actually okay with most insects if I know they're there, but can be easily startled by them if I don't. It's the spiders that are going to get me in the end I think. *shudders*
In truth though, I am fascinated by spiders and really enjoyed reading Hormiga's article "Systematics, Phylogeny, and Evolution of Orb-Weaving Spiders." Well, when I say "enjoy" I really mean appreciate. Like a good horror movie or something. Just because I'm convinced that spiders belong outdoors and that any spider indoors is poisonous and trying to eat me doesn't mean that I can't be appreciative of them. The introduction didn't do much for my unease, "Ubiquitous, diverse, and exclusively predatory, spiders (Araneae) are among the largest animal groups and the dominant arthropod predators in most terrestrial ecosystems. About 44,000 spider
species have been described to date." But I found myself fascinated by the descriptions of web building.
Another article of interest is Ayasse's "Chemical Ecology of Bumble Bees" mostly because it introduced me to the wonderfully-named cuckoo bumble bees. "The 27 species within the subgenus Psithyrus, known as cuckoo bumble bees, lack a worker caste and live as social parasites in colonies of other bumble bees. Female cuckoo bumble bees are always reproductives that invade the nest of a social species in late spring and exploit host workers, which care for their progeny." How awesome is that!?
My favorite new word for this volume comes from Dickinson's "death Valley, Drosophila, and the Devonian Toolkit." From the acronyms and definitions I present to you stigmergy: the process by which a complicated behavior sequence emerges from a chain of simpler stimulus-evoked actions. I keep looking for a way to slip it into conversations with limited success.
From the same article I learned about stripe fixation: a robust visuomotor reflex in which a flying animal steers toward a conspicuous vertical stripe or edge. Apparently this is a /very/ strong reflex in most insects. We do know they use the strips for navigation, but we're not sure why. "During this entire sequence, which Gotz calculated to require over 32 million wing beats, the flies steered continuously toward the stripe. These experiments document both the durability and the stamina of flies as well as the absurd saliency of vertical stripes... Stripe fixation is such a ferociously strong reflex in D. melanogaster and other insects that it is difficult
to imagine it does not serve some kind of ethological function-but what is it?"
Another interesting idea comes from Denlinger's article "Mosquito Diapause." (diapause, another new word referring to a "period of arrested development that can occur during any stage of insect development." The growing insect just... pauses to before starting to grow again.) The idea I found myself investigating was the maternal effect "the common case in which the mother receives the environmental signals that result in the programming of diapause in her progeny." So something happens to the mosquito which changes how quickly
her offspring hatch and develop.
The rush of the new year is over now that Ento has posted. So we get some breathing room up here to recover before Medicine posts.
Annual Review of Medicine Volume 65 The articles that interested me the most in this volume of Medicine sound as if they may have been lifted from Economics, or possibly Political Science. There has been a lot of talk this year about health care of course, and it was interesting to see read our authors' take on the subject. Of these, Gordon's "Delivering Value: Provider Efforts to Improve the Quality and reduce the Cost of Health Care" contained what I think was the best summation: "Health care today is characterized by a cacophony of opinions, large volumes of data, huge
constituencies with frequently conflicting perspectives, and heightened tensions, owing to health care's life-and death significance to individuals and the importance of its costs to the nation's economy. The process of change will be neither quick nor simple, but, as this review shows, it is gaining momentum."
Another articles that caught my eye was Difede's "Evidence-Based Treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder." (I don't know if there is more interest in PTSD these days, or if I'm noticing the articles more often.) Difede re-introduced me to the concept of translational research: "in which preclinical research findings inform the development of new treatments, and it refers to the dissemination of new treatments to the community to encourage the use of the new health practices and treatments." I was particularly interested in the section about treating PTSD as an emotional learning disorder and it was fascinating to read about it from the medical side.
So much of my reading is from the Psychology perspective that I tend to overlook the physical damage caused by the "mental disorders." This may be why the other article on my reading list is Currier's "Depression as a Risk Factor for Cancer" which lays out some of the physical stresses caused by depression. Another topic in Medicine that I'm following pretty closely is the ongoing debate on how new genetic information changes the way we approach our health. In this volume there is Boycott's "Identification of Genes for Childhood Heritable Diseases" and Caskey's "Adult Genetic Risk Screening." Hopefully I'll find time to read them more closely this weekend!
Annual Review of Pathology Volume 9 The ever fascinating Pathology comes with the usual warning - there are some illustrations in this volume that can be unpleasant to stumble upon.
Speaking of unpleasant illustrations a quick look at Bastian's article on "The Molecular Pathology of Melanoma" will convince you to give up the tanning beds and stock up on sunscreen. This article makes it pretty clear that childhood sunbathing isn't the only factor in melanoma and often the problem begins in areas that aren't directly damaged by the sun. Not recommended beach reading this one, but it's on my reading list regardless.
For reasons close to my own neck, Tomer's article on "Mechanisms of Autoimmune Thyroid Diseases" was the first article in this volume to catch my attention. While I don't have Graves or Hashimoto's, any look at how thyroid problems develop is going to make it to the top of my list. While most of the science in this article is /way/ over my head I did learn some new information from skimming it: "Autoimmune responses target the thyroid more frequently than any other organ. The prevalence of the autoimmune thyroid diseases (AITDs)
Graves' disease (GD) and Hashimoto's thyroiditis (HT) is estimated to be 5%. The prevalence of subclinical disease manifested by the production of antithyroid antibodies without clinical disease (considered a biomarker of genetic susceptibility) may be even higher."
Mavragani's article introduced me to an intriguing new disease - Sjogren's Syndrome - in which the immune system attacks and destroys the glands that produce tears and saliva. The authors note in the introduction that "it is considered a rather benign disease" but point out that it does seem connected to other types of autoimmune disorders, "such as lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and systemic sclerosis." So that gives me some cheerful weekend reading!
I'm going to start posting these as they come in I think - so these posts won't be quite so long.