The Center

The Bay Area Physical Sciences-Oncology Center is a collaboration among several universities and other research organizations, including UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, the Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the California Institute of Quantitative Biosciences.

Annual site visit: 2013 details

UC Berkeley will be hosting this year’s site visit on Thursday, September 12, 2013.

Upcoming Dinner Seminars

Thursday 2 May 2013: Claudia Fischbach-Teschl
Cornell University
5-7pm
621 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley
"Engineered micro-environmental niches for studies of tumor-stroma interactions"
Please see flyer for description.
please rsvp to saheli [AT] Berkeley [dot] edu.

Thursday 9 May 2013: David Odde
University of Minnesota
5-7pm
106 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley
please rsvp to saheli [AT] Berkeley [dot] edu.

Thursday 23 May 2013: Scott Manalis
MIT
5-7pm
212 Byers Hall, UCSF
please rsvp to saheli [AT] Berkeley [dot] edu.

Thursday 6 June 2013: Celeste Nelson
Princeton University
5-7pm
106 Stanley Hall, UC Berkeley
please rsvp to saheli [AT] Berkeley [dot] edu.

Research Highlight

In a study published in PNAS, a team led by PSOC PI Mina J. Bissell and young investigator Dr. Kandice Tanner describe discovering that clusters of mammary gland cells rotate as they grow and divide. The angular motion helps the growing clusters form into well ordered spheres. Using the 3-D culture technique that Mina Bissell pioneered with colleagues 20 years ago, Dr. Tanner took 3-dimensional confocal microscopy images over time, creating a movie that revealed the motion. Actomyosin molecules in the cells' cytoskeletons generate a contractile force that causes the cell to rotate very slowly around an axis, approximately one revolution per hour. Disruption of this process in malignant cell lines may be a factor in the disordered structures that are a hallmark of tumorgenesis.