The molecular basis of human papillomavirus

   Around the age of 13, I had to get the vaccine for the human papillomavirus (HPV), as I'm sure most females have. I have never looked into what this virus is and why I had to receive this vaccine. I started my search with Molecular biology of human papillomavirus infection and cervical cancer. It turns out, there are over 100 different HPV types that have been identified. These different types of HPVs cause a variety of epithelial lesions. The two main HPVs are the alpha and beta papillomaviruses. Beta papillomaviruses can spread if unchecked and can lead to the development of non-melanoma skin cancer. Alpha papillomavirus is the largest group of HPVs out of all of the types.

    Alpha papillomaviruses cause warts, which are usually not linked to cancer in most patients. However, there are 30 types of HPVs that infect the cervical epithelium and part of these cause lesions that can lead to cancer and are labeled as "high-risk" HPV. The most common high-risk HPV type is known as HPV16, which causes about 50% of cervical cancers. High-risk HPV infections occur in younger woman (about 25), approximately 20-40%. As you get older, however, the risk of cervical cancer is lowered due to the infections clearing up or the immune system gaining control of the infection.

    Human papillomaviruses are circular with double stranded DNA and have a protective capsid. This virus will infect the epithelial cells of the cervical mucosa and integrates the DNA into the cellular genome. While 90% will heal within approximately two years, some instances involve the HPV DNA integrating into tumor cell DNA and developing into cancer. The life cycle of HPV includes the initial infection, uncoating, amplification of its' genome, and packaging to form new viral particles. The papillomaviruses will cause cancer when regulation of gene expression is disturbed. Oncoproteins E6 and E7 are apart of the regulation of cell proliferation and cell death. When these are expressed incorrectly it can be extremely dangerous and leads to the cancer causing papillomavirus.


Reference:
http://www.clinsci.org/content/110/5/525.full

Lydia Villa-Komaroff

Lydia Villa-Komaroff is an award winning researcher who has surpassed racial and gender barriers. Her family is native to Mexico, but she was born in New Mexico. At a young age she began to fall in love with science. She started her collegiate journey as a chemistry major but soon changed to biology. After moving to Washington D.C with her soon-to-be husband, she was denied acceptance into Johns Hopkins University to finish her undergraduate degree because female students were not being accepted. Despite this set back, she finished her degree at a different college and later continued on to graduate school at MIT. This is where she began her work in the field of molecular biology and gained her PhD in cell biology.
 
Dr. Villa-Komaroff was apart of a research team the worked on cloning insulin in 1977. She was successfully apart of the group that conducted the first synthesis of mammalian insulin in bacterial cells with the use of recombinant DNA. Her research also includes the discovery of a molecule associated with Alzheimer's disease causes degeneration of neurons in the brain. This molecule is known as amyloid beta, and before her research it was not very clear if this molecule produced the degeneration or was a byproduct of the degeneration of the neurons. This discovery led to further research on treating Alzheimer's by targeting the amyloid beta molecule.

If her groundbreaking research wasn't amazing enough, Dr. Villa-Komaroff has attained numerous awards and honors. A number of her awards have been in regards for Hispanics or women in science. This just goes to show that she was able to break through the barriers she faced in her early scientific career.

Here is an article on her:
http://www.unhny.org/programs-and-issues/stem-spotlight-lydia
Here is her article regarding her research on cloning insulin:
http://www.pnas.org/content/75/8/3727.full.pdf

Don't FRET!

Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer, that is. This technique is used for probing intermolecular interactions and determining spatial measurements of macromolecules. I recently heard about this technique for the first time and it sparked my interest.

FRET utilizes chromophores, which is the part of the molecule that produces color through absorption and transmittance. The donor chromophore, which is in an excited state, will transfer its energy non-radiatively to the acceptor chromophore. At a certain wavelength, the acceptor chromophore will absorb in the same region that the donor chromophore will emit fluorescence. When the two chromophores are far enough apart, you will only see the donor chromophore lit up. When they get closer together, the donor will give it's energy to the acceptor chromophore, allowing the acceptor to light up and the donor to not. The donor will only transfer the energy to the acceptor when they are in close proximity to each other. Since this energy transfer only occurs at certain distances, there are a variety of uses for this technique.

FRET can be used to examine intermembrane exchange of lipid components, vesicle-vesicle interactions, and membrane fusion, as these all involve changes in distances. It has been used to look at viruses and how they fuse to cells. Interactions between membrane proteins and the components of the membrane in cells has been analyzed with FRET. This has the ability to observe cellular communication and how information might be transferred. FRET is commonly used to measure distances of proteins and other components.

Here are some images that might help you understand it better:

Retrieved from: http://www.nature.com/nprot/journal/v8/n2/images_article/nprot.2012.147-F1.jpg

Retrieved from: http://www.olympusmicro.com/primer/techniques/fluorescence/fret/images/fretintrofigure8.jpg

Here is the link for the article:
s3.amazonaws.com/academia.edu.documents/43538328/1-s2.0-0958166995800166-main.pdf?AWSAccessKeyId=AKIAJ56TQJRTWSMTNPEA&Expires=1476495950&Signature=95QxZdbyRnxa0ZnKOL6%2F3dXdxFA%3D&response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3DS2.0_0958166995800166_main.pdf

Biohazard Waste: Where does it all go?

      Each day we come into lab, we are filling up the biohazard waste more and more. Like me, I'm sure some of you have wondered: Where does it all go? Well this week, I am here to give you that answer!
      We put every micropipette tip, whether hazardous or not, into the biohazard buckets. We also fill it with paper towels, gloves, and a variety of other items used throughout our labs. A company hired by the institution, like our school or hospitals, come to pick up these containers or bags. Once these are back at the companies facility, the waste is sorted through to remove any items that could be recycled after being sterilized. Next, an autoclave is used to sterilize all of the waste. An autoclave forces air out while steaming the waste at very high heat that bacteria cannot survive in. Once all of the waste is made safe, it is disposed of normally in a dump/landfill or recycled. Some of the plastic items are even melted down and recycled to make new products.
      Before federal regulations were made, the waste was collected into plastic boxes and bags and disposed of normally. One can only imagine the issues this could cause to the environment. Needles used to draw blood from people with infectious diseases would be disposed of without sterilization and be out there in the environment. Not only would the environment be affected, but also those who may come into contact with the waste. If a needle was placed into a plastic bag rather than a box and it pokes through the bag, it could puncture a person and who knows the variety of dangers that could cause. Biohazard waste companies are the only ones that can dispose of this waste according to regulations.
       So next time you dispose of your micropipette tips in those red boxes, you know where they will end up and you can have peace of mind knowing they are taken care of safely.

I got my info from a waste disposal company at this website:
https://www.medprodisposal.com/what-happens-with-biohazardous-waste-once-its-placed-in-the-designated-container/amp