This episode was recorded live in collaboration with Harvard University’s Science In The News for their Science by the Pint series. Together we hosted MIT professor Angelika Amon at Saloon Davis Square, where she shared her lab’s work on chromosome imbalance and cancer. She gave an overview of her lab’s impressive work in this area, then answered questions from Tim on the GLiMPSE team before fielding questions from our live audience gathered at the bar.

Science by the Pint is a free science cafe that brings Boston area research professors, along with their lab members, into local bars to chat about their research with the public: http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/science-by-the-pint/

Special thanks to Christopher Rota from Science In The News for his help putting this event together!

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Amon lab at MIT: https://biology.mit.edu/profile/angelika-amon/

Paper on the fitness costs of aneuploidy: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ccell.2016.12.004

Paper on the mutability caused by aneuploidy: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2017.03.021

Paper on immune sensing and clearance of aneuploid cells: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.devcel.2017.05.022

Angelika mentioned a paper from Jeanne Lawrence’s lab at UMass Worcester during audience Q and A. In this work the authors studied a unique stretch from the human X chromosome that allows it to be silenced. They moved this stretch of DNA onto the extra chromosome 21 in cells from patients with Down Syndrome, and they found that it silenced this extra chromosome and that this silencing reversed the effects on cellular behaviors seen in Down Syndrome: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12394

Big thanks to Saloon Davis Square for hosting us!

Music Credits:

“Over Under”, “Allada”
Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Transcript of this episode: Amon podcast transcript

When cells lose their balance with Angelika Amon