Growing pains
The human genome sequence is proving a boon to researchers investigating disorders of the skeleton.
A matrix approach
The blue hoardings around a building site in Manchester mask the foundations of a new building (right) for the university funded in large part by the Joint Infrastructure Fund - not an uncommon sight at present. But for researchers at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research, these foundations hold a special appeal. Instead of being spread along several of the many corridors in the massive Stopford Building, the Centre's 21 research groups will have a new purpose-built home by the end of 2003.
"We've designed the new building to promote as much interaction between researchers as possible," says Professor Martin Humphries, Director of the Centre. "Thus, the layout of the labs, offices and write-up spaces is generic, and open-plan. It is also important, however, to provide scientists with a home, and we have achieved this by grouping four to six laboratories into shared space that is under their control."
The functions of the extracellular matrix, the meshwork that holds cells together in the body, have often been overlooked. Indeed, open a biology textbook and you're likely to see a cartoon of a cell floating in nothing. "The reality is that, as soon as you get more than one cell in an organism, you need to organize them relative to each other," says Professor Humphries. "A human has billions of cells, and the cells need to be organized into tissues, held in the right place or helped to move around, and allowed to communicate properly. The extracellular matrix fulfils a key role."
The research at the Centre falls into three programmes. "In the first programme, we are investigating how interactions between cells and the matrix regulate cell signalling, and in turn how this modulates movement, growth and death. So this work has implications for diseases such as thrombosis, cancer and inflammation. In the second programme, we want to know how the matrix meshwork that lies between cells is assembled and controlled, and how it gives tissues shape, elasticity or tensile strength. With this knowledge, we can begin to engineer tissues with synthetic structures containing cells of varying differentiated status. And lastly we're employing genetic approaches to study the whole organism, primarily to determine the role played by cell-matrix interactions during development and to identify human diseases caused by defects in matrix."
The matrix is involved in most major human diseases, either directly, as in osteoarthritis, or indirectly, as in genetic diseases that affect the matrix. But in other cases, normal cell adhesive events are usurped by the condition. "In asthma, for example, white blood cells move into the lung, or in cancer, endothelial cells penetrate tumour tissue to create new blood vessels. The white blood cells and endothelial cells are not abnormal, but if we can find ways to stop cells adhering and migrating, we may be able to treat the diseases."
Professor Martin Humphries at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell-Matrix Research, University of Manchester: Research interests
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