News

Whitehead Member Iain Cheeseman has been selected as a 2009 Searle Scholar. He is one of 15 award recipients chosen from 178 recently appointed assistant professors in the chemical and biological sciences.

Whitehead researchers have identified a novel mechanism that operates during formation of the “primary mouth”, the first opening between the outside of the embryo and the intestine.

Whitehead Institute researchers have found a large number of new prions, greatly expanding scientists’ notion of how important prions might be in normal biology and demonstrating that they play many and varied roles in the inheritance of biological traits.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) has awarded Whitehead Member Peter Reddien an Early Career Scientist appointment, a six-year funded position that allows him to pursue his innovative biomedical research.

Whitehead Institute researchers have identified a protein complex that harnesses energy from protein filaments, called microtubules, to pull chromosomes to opposite ends of a cell during cell division. The protein complex, known as Ska1, is a component of the kinetochore, a larger protein complex that hitches the microtubule ends to the chromosome.

Scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and the National University of Singapore have discovered the first microRNA (miRNA) capable of directly tamping down the activity of the well known tumor-suppressor gene, p53. While p53 functions to prevent tumor formation, the p53 gene is thought to malfunction in more than 50% of cancerous tumors.

Whitehead Institute researchers have pinpointed a cellular pathway that determines whether cancerous tumors are susceptible to dietary restriction during their development. When this pathway, known as PI3K is permanently turned “on” via mutation, tumors grow and proliferate independent of the amount of food consumed. However, when the PI3K pathway operates normally, tumors respond to dietary restriction—defined as food consumption limited to 60% of normal--and become smaller in size.

Deploying a method that removes potentially cancer-causing genes, Whitehead Institute researchers have “reprogrammed” human skin cells from Parkinson’s disease patients into an embryonic-stem-cell-like state. Whitehead scientists then used these so-called induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells to create dopamine-producing neurons, the cell type that degenerates in Parkinson’s disease patients.

Whitehead Member Rudolf Jaenisch has been awarded the 2008 Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is the top place to work for postdoctoral researchers, according to The Scientist’s seventh annual survey of research institutions nationwide, released today.