April Wrap Up, May Currently Reading

April is over! May is about to begin. That means finals are about to begin for those in college. That means my finals are about to begin. That means I’m procrastinating studying by writing this post. Woot!

Overview of Blog Activity for the Month:

10 Tags posted
- My Intimidating TBR Pile Tag
- The Book Sacrifice Tag
- The Back to the Future Tag
- Skyrim Book Tag
- 3 Days, 3 Quotes – Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3
- Rip It or Ship It Book Tag
- 100 Questions No One Ever Asks Tag
- Burn, Rewrite, Reread
3 Top 5 Wednesdays posted

And that’s it, honestly. No books-I’ve-read content this month. You’ll see why in a second because I’m awful.

Total posted for April: 13

Reading Overview for the Month:

Books:

*crickets*

THAT’S RIGHT I DIDN’T FINISH ANY BOOKS AT ALL. I have no excuse.

And inspired by Zezee, I’m now going to keep track of articles and other things I read too, because I did actually read stuff this month, it’s just all school-related.

Articles:

The yeast Hsp70 Ssa1 is a sensor for activation of the heat shock response by thiol-reactive compounds by Yanyu Wang, Patrick A Gibney, James D West and Kevin A Morano

I read this for my Cell Biology class and what it comes down to (in super layman’s terms but not so basic that it’s an insult to the authors I hope) is that these authors conducted an experiment to determine whether a specific element of stress-response in a cell could be activated using exposure to a thiol (a compound with a sulfur on it), which is different than the typical methods used to cause the reaction (high temperature, toxins, protein misfoldings, etc). Once they gathered evidence that yes, the cell will activate its stress response when exposed to thiols, they tested to see if disabling the particular element that reacted to the thiols would stop the entire cell from reacting, period. The article concludes that yes, the cell won’t react, and because of that, this very specific element of stress-response (Hsp70 Ssa1) needs to be active for the cell to respond to the stress caused by thiol presence.

I thought this article was a very interesting read, and I hoped I explained it in a way to be understandable yet still accurate.

siRNA-mediated silencing of CDK8 inhibits proliferation and growth in breast cancer cells by Xiao-Yu Li, Qi-Feng Luo, Chuan-Kui Wei, Deng-Feng Li, Lin Fang

This was another really interesting read, also done for my cell biology class. This one was written in a way that was a bit easier for the average person to understand without needing to know a bunch of jargon, so I appreciated that. Again, in super layman’s terms, the authors in this article conducted an experiment to determine if stopping the production of a specific protein involved in transcription (gene reading/copying) could prevent cancer cells from multiplying as effectively. They did this by destroying the gene segment responsible for creating this protein in the first place. They conducted a number of tests to gather evidence in a number of different ways – tested to see if cancer cell production lessened when the gene segment responsible for the protein under study was destroyed, tested to see if cancer cells could move through membranes as effectively with that protein destroyed, etc etc. And they discovered in the end that yes, this protein (CDK8) is very important in the reproduction and movement of cancer cells throughout the body and that developing a treatment to lessen its expression (creation) in a cell could be beneficial to breast cancer treatment.