With my down time, I wanted to learn more about what I was doing. I talked to Dr. Willey and asked him about the questions I had. The main thing that I had wondered was why they had chosen to study CEBPG. I had asked him this before and he had told me that it was a transcription factor. At the time, this had satisfied me. However, there are many transcription factors in cells, so now I wanted to know why CEBPG was special. He told me CEBPG was believed to be the paramount transcription factor in regulating lung epithelium based on a paper Dr. Willey helped with in 2005 ( click here to read it). Basically, CEBPG controls important antioxidants and DNA repair genes.
So ultimately, I wanted to know what they were hypothesizing. Dr. Willey told me that they want to see how much the gene expression of genes regulated by CEBPG is effected when cells are treated by siRNA. Once they get data, they will hopefully be able to conclude how much the other genes are effected by using siRNA for CEBPG
Also, I never got to show where I was working. This is my little office area where I have been every day during Winterim:
So far, so good, but why do they care how much the other genes are affected by using siRNA for CEBPG? Why does this matter?
ReplyDeleteI think I understand why they are so interested in CEBPG. It is mainly because of the tests they developed a few years ago. The test allowed them to judge someone's risk for lung cancer based upon the abundance of 14 genes in epithelial cells in the airways. They know based upon a past paper that CEBPG controls some genes that play major roles in cell regulation. I don't know the exact reason, but I believe it's to see if siRNA for CEBPG could change how at risk someone is for lung cancer by modifying the gene expression of the other important genes.
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