News

The last few years have witnessed critical advances in breast cancer therapies. Still, the disease afflicts one in eight American women, and scientists have yet to develop a living model with which they can study the intricacies of human breast-tumor behavior. Now, a team in the lab of scientist Robert Weinberg at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research has successfully grafted human breast tissue into the mammary glands of mice.

Teradyne, Inc. founder and former Chairman of the MIT Corporation Alex d’Arbeloff has been named to the Board of Directors for Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. d’Arbeloff is presently a professor of practice at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and honorary chairman of the MIT Corporation.

In work that may lead to a better understanding of genetic diseases, researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT, Harvard University and Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research show that baker’s yeast was created hundreds of millions of years ago when its ancestor temporarily became a kind of super-organism with twice the usual number of chromosomes and increased potential to evolve.

In the late 1970s, Harvey Lodish co-taught the very first cell biology class at Massachusetts Institute of Technology – a course that existed in very few universities. As a result, he was in the bothersome position of having to teach without a text. But eventually, Lodish’s frustration led to action, and the result was one of the more successful textbooks in the $100-million industry of life sciences texts.

Researchers have developed a method for scanning the entire human genome to successfully map the location of key gene regulators, mutated forms of which are known to cause type 2 diabetes. The research marks the first time that human organshave been analyzed in this way and opens the door to similar studies.

Many scientists believe that the further a cell is from the embryonic stem cell stage, the harder it is to make a successful clone using that cell’s genetic material. Now, researchers at Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have cloned mice using olfactory neurons – cells far removed from the embryonic state.

New research into a family of cell wall proteins shows how yeast can present a variety of “faces” to its environment. In pathogens like yeast, these cell surface proteins regulate how the cell sticks to other cells, interacts with surrounding tissue and evades detection by the immune system.

Two studies by scientists in the lab of Whitehead Member Terry Orr-Weaver that shed light on developmental strategies of Drosophila were published in recent issues of the journals Developmental Cell and Current Biology.

Susan Lindquist, director of Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and a professor of biology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been elected to the Board of Directors of Johnson & Johnson.

A single gene that codes for more than 38,000 different proteins may allow individual cells in the brain to distinguish themselves from other cells, says Andrew Chess, a scientist at Whitehead Institute and lead author of the study, which appears online this week in the journal Nature Genetics.