Thursday, November 25, 2010

Gene Regulation and Signal Transduction in Hormone Linked Cancers

Sporadic cancers of breast, endometrium, ovary and prostate are considered to be hormone-related and are proposed to share a distinct mechanism of carcinogenesis. Cadmium (Cd) has recently been reported to possess endocrine disrupting properties and has been proposed to be a potent metalloestrogen. Both in vivo and in vitro studies have demonstrated the changes in the expression level of cellular proto-oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes p53, c-jun and c-myc in the presence of Cd. However the findings are inconsistent and inconclusive.Findings suggest that ER-mediated intracellular signaling pathways may be involved in the biological activity of Cd.Furthermore, study contributes to the conflict data obtained in different in vivo and in vitro models used to investigate the Cd-induced changes in gene expression at different dose groups for tumor suppressor gene p53, IERGs (c-myc, c-fos, c-jun), HSP 32, negative regulator of tumor suppressor gene Mdm2 and SP1 and p38.As Cd is associated with the risks of hormone-linked cancers and all people have a lifelong exposure to Cd via food,so this is of public concern. The study provides very limited information on the biological activity of cadmium in an in vivo setting.However, more research is needed to clarify the specific signaling pathways involved in Cd-mediated responses.

Friday, January 22, 2010

Learn Molecular Cell Biology Visually in 24 Hours

Molecular Cell Biology is an integrated science of biology at both the cellular level and molecular level.It could be an overwhelming course to learn. I will recommend a new way to learn this course with ease – rich media!
Rich media is a wide range of interactive digital media available today on the web. Coupling of rich media and smart teaching, it is the new learning system called “Rapid Learning”.Well, first thing first, how can you learn Molecular Cell Biology in 24 hours?
Let me answer this …
Learn it the rich-media way. In one intensive hour per chapter, you will study the visual tutoria of one chapter for 30 minutes, then you will practice on the interactive problem drill for another 20 minutes, and finally you will super-review the chapter via the pre-made chapter cheat sheet.
With the latest web and video technologies, online learning is now a snap, anytime and anyplace. It is much more enjoyable and rewarding than crawling through your lengthy textbooks.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

The Importance of Meta Tags:

For the uninitiated, meta-tags are pieces of code within your website that contain information about each page. These tags are supposed to tell search engines and users what the page is about.If you're a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here's a primer.
There are essentially three types of meta-tags that concern most marketers:
* Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser.
* Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page.
* Keywords - These are words that are important in the page.Up until about 4 years ago, there was a tremendous focus on meta-tags as a method of improving search engine rankings. Webmasters could stuff all sorts of words into the meta-tags to improve their search engine rankings for the words they wanted to rank well for.It wasn't long before the search engines caught on to this little trick, and as a result the efficacy of "keyword-stuffed" meta-tags dwindled over time. Posts on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) boards heralded the demise of the meta-tag with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta-tags. It seemed that there was no use for meta-tags anymore - at least from the perspective of the online marketer.Meta-tag Re-emergenceBut then a funny thing happened. The search market started to fracture. Yahoo and MSN both spun up their own search engines and dropped Google's results from their engines. Both Yahoo and MSN's new engines seemed to use content from the Title and Description meta-tags to display in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).These observations appear to be the case even today. By running a query for the term, "Online Advertising" on MSN, I got some interesting results (screenshots available at (http://www.profitchoice.com/articles/support/meta_msn.asp)Now, if you look at the screenshots in the link above, you'll notice that the clickable link on the search engine matches the page's title tag verbatim, and the site's description in MSN starts off with the first sentence of the description tag. Yahoo operates in a very similar fashion. Many of the results on the SERPs of both search engines will use the content from the meta-tags heavily (as long as the pages have meta-tags at all).Google is less predictable with regard to the use of meta-tags. Google often uses the title tag to determine the clickable link on it's results pages, but only occasionally uses the description tag content in the page summary that it displays.Remember the Human BeingsOk, now that I've put you to sleep with technical details and observations it's time to wake up, because there is a very important marketing point that I'm working towards here.The point that I'm driving at is that although the search engines probably have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important.When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough to be #1 on the list of results. You still need to convince those humans to click on your link. The way to do that is to design the most effective page description that can possibly appear in the SERPs.Steps to Take To Improve Your Meta-TagsAs a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of your Meta Description tag in the site description it displays on your SERPs; MSN uses the first 15 or so.Write out a 30-word description of each page of your website that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words need to get across what the page is about - this is all the MSN searchers will see. The second 15 words should support the first - this will be visible to Yahoo searchers.Google searchers will sometimes see the first 7 - 15 words as well (although you can't count on it). With meta-tags you have to just focus on the things you can control, and right now Google is an unknown quantity so it's probably best not to worry about optimizing for Google.Don't Drop the Meta-TagsSeveral years ago the search engines devalued the use of meta-tags in determining rankings. But because they use the meta-tags as page descriptions in their SERP pages, you must make special efforts to ensure that the content presented to searchers inspires them to click on your links rather than your competitors'.If you don't put meta-tags on your website's pages, then Yahoo and MSN (with a combined market share of around 45%) will just guess at what to put in the description of your website. They will pull phrases out of context (much the way Google does) from your site and slap them in there. The result is not nearly as inviting as it could have been otherwise. That's why it is always beneficial to learn to write effective meta-tags.