Cancer-Killing Diatoms, Slug, and Manipulate

Today I Learned:
1) ...about an article from this month's issue of Nature in which the authors genetically engineered diatoms to selectively deliver chemotheraputic drugs to cancer cells. The diatoms carry vesicles filled with the drugs, and they've been engineered to express an antibody to some cancer-specific membrane marker on their own membranes, causing them to localize to cancer cells and deliver the drugs pretty specifically. In an immune-compromised mouse model, they reduced cancer volumes by about half.

This is *decidedly not a game-changer* when it comes to cancer, but it does seem like a potentially useful incremental advance. It's not hard to imagine adding a diatom delivery vehicle on top of just about every existing chemotheraputic to make them more specific and, hopefully, more effective. Plus, it's a pretty creative use of diatoms, and I'm a sucker for anything with diatoms.

2) ...how the gene Slug got its name.

Our story begins with the genes Snai1 and Snai2. These are closely-related transcription factors important for early embryonic development in Drosophila and probably most elsewhere. The names are derived from some kind of structural information -- to be honest, I can't find the original etymology of the names, but "SNAI" stood for something related to the structure of the proteins. Then someone either noticed that "Snai1" looks a lot like "Snail" or misread it, published a paper about the "Snail" genes, and the name stuck.

What to call Snai2? Snaiz? It just doesn't have the same ring. Snai2, it turns out, is more or less Snai1 without a certain degradation tag. So kind of like a snail without a shell... call it Slug!

(For the record, yes, there's a Snai3, and it's called "Smuc". No, I don't know why.)

3) ...how to use Mathematica's "Manipulate" function! It's a pretty nifty function -- you can give it a statement (which can be a graph!!!), some variables, and ranges for those variables, and Mathematica spits out an interactive graphic with a slider for each variable. You can slide the slider around to whatever values you want, and it will show you how your statement changes in response!