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Interactive Library Offers a Look at Cancer Neurons Stem Cells

Express your inner scientist, explore the interactive library at the Children's Hospital Boston Research Web site. Recently launched on the site: How Cancer Grows and Spreads and The Neuron. Also available are features that let users manipulate stem cells and control cell structure.

How Cancer Grows and Spreads

This animated Flash feature illustrates the growth, progression and metastasis of carcinomas. In this presentation, cancer researchers Bruce Zetter, PhD, and Marsha Moses, PhD, identify fourteen possible stages of a carcinoma and show the possible paths the disease can take as it moves from one stage to another. Using the presentation's "roadmap," users are able to choose their own routes as they travel from one possible cancer stage to the next. At each stop along the way, they learn details about that stage through descriptions and animated illustrations, and they can learn about current treatments and the latest research advances.

The Neuron

The Neuron gives users the opportunity to experiment with a virtual neuron to see what conditions are needed to make it fire and also with a circuit of interconnected neurons to see how neurons work together to process information. In addition, the feature provides step-through animations that illustrate how electrical currents move down the neuron along the axon (action potential) and how neurons pass their signals along (synaptic transmission).

Additional Interactive Features

Virtual Stem Cell Laboratory

The Virtual Stem Cell Laboratory is home to a computer-generated "living" culture of embryonic stem cells. When the Flash-based feature is launched, the cells quickly begin to reproduce through the process of mitosis (cell division). Users can then add different "coaxing" factors -- proteins, for example -- to differentiate the cells into increasingly specialized cell types. From the initial colony of embryonic stem cells, virtual scientists can create 16 cell types ranging from red blood cells to motor neurons. The cells are even programmed to behave like their real counterparts. As the lab produces new cell types, the user learns what scientists know about the cells, including any known or potential therapeutic applications.

Make a Micrograph

Creating a micrograph -- a photo taken through a microscope -- is not simply a matter of attaching a camera to a microscope and releasing the shutter. Rather, it's a multistep process that involves "staining" with antibodies, illuminating with various wavelengths of light, and adding and combining colors. This interactive feature details the process.

Tensegrity in a Cell

For more than three decades, Children's researcher Donald Ingber, MD, PhD, has explored and verified the notion that living cells are tensegrity structures -- structures that stabilize themselves by balancing tension and compression. With this interactive feature, users can control a cell's internal structural elements to discover what tensegrity is all about and why it's important to cell function.

Ingber's Egg Analogy

In his lectures, Dr. Ingber often uses simple analogies to explain how tissues form and how diseases develop. In this Flash presentation, he uses eggs in a carton to illustrate how cells in tissues behave during wound healing and tumor formation.

Introduction to Proteomics

Proteomics -- the study of protein complexity in cells, tissues and organisms -- is the hot new science that picks up where the Human Genome Project left off. With this animated, user-controlled interactive feature, find out how researchers sequence and identify proteins. You can also take a virtual tour of Children's new Proteomics Center and read about how researchers are using proteomics to better understand the human body and improve medical care.

http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom

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