Cholesterol and Cancer
The link between cholesterol and heart disease is well established. Now, new evidence is forging an intriguing link between cholesterol and cancer. A high-fat diet is a well-known but poorly understood risk factor for prostate cancer, which may involve increased levels of cholesterol in the blood.
Our lab recently discovered a connection between a major player involved in maintaining cholesterol balance in animal cells and a key proliferative pathway that is overactive in many cancers, including prostate cancer. This project investigates novel ways to decrease cellular cholesterol levels in prostate cancer cells , which may inform the development of new anti-cancer therapies.
Methods employed for this project include mammalian cell culture, recombinant DNA techniques, fluorescence microscopy, real-time PCR, gene transfection, metabolic labelling, use of luciferase reporter assays, SDS-PAGE and Western blotting.
BABS personnel responsible for this project:
Spoligotype patterns evolve through the deletion of spacer sequences that cannot be recovered and have provided Associate Professor Mark Tanaka with a rich source of data with which to understand the transmission of disease.