Science Market Update

There's a reason why top university medical centers garner the prestige (and the funding) that they do: research labs + medical school + hospital = optimization of all three units, with ripe opportunities for collaboration, sharing of resources, and recruiting the best medical scientists. So there's always reason to cheer when a major university med center like Ohio State builds new facilities, whether they're clinical or research, because both will support the institution's overall mission and budget.  In the case of Ohio State's new James Cancer Center and Solove Research Institute, both patients seeking treatment and scientists doing basic and applied cancer research will benefit from the state-of-the-art building that is rising on the Columbus medical campus right now, with its opening due in 2014. The complex will house the cancer center on 12 stories; the other 8 will comprise the critical care hospital, mechanical equipment and an as yet undetermined floor.

The smooth and efficient functioning of any system necessarily requires a mechanism for recognizing and removing components that have served their purpose and are no longer needed, in order to make way for ones that are.  It's waste disposal, and at the cellular level it's the important activity of proteasomes that maintain cellular health by identifying and degrading proteins that have been targeted as obsolete or damaged. (To put this in perspective, consider that at any given moment a human cell typically contains about 100,000 different proteins.) This housekeeping function of proteasomes is critical to a broad range of vital biochemical processes, including transcription, DNA repair, and the immune defense system. Since the proteasome process was only first described in 2004 (by Nobel Prize-winning chemists), our understanding of its mechanics has been limited.