Sticking with tradition

Sticking with Carrots and Sticks (Sticking Points Aside): A Response to Ventakapuram, Goldberg, and Forrow

Sticking with synthetic tissue sealants.

Tissue reanastomosis and wound closure are vital steps in surgery. Similarly, in percutaneous intervention, localized hemostasis is essential. Traditionally, sutures and staples have been used for tissue approximation and closure. Despite their basic efficacy, these tools have limitations that include the added trauma to tissue during placement and the difficulty of deployment in small spaces a...

Sticking Points

Nowadays a blood test usually requires a doctor’s visit, a needle poke in the arm, and a day-long wait for results to come back from a lab. So when Silicon Valley start-up Theranos promised a device that could perform more than a hundred of the most commonly ordered blood tests from just a fingerstick, doctors, patients, and investors were quick to get behind the company. Valued at $9 billion i...

Sticking together.

R signals at the neuromuscular junction and at synapses between neurons are carried by small molecules, called neurotransmitters, that are released from the presynaptic terminal and bind to ligand-gated ion channels in the postsynaptic membrane. When transmitter binds, a small pore opens through which ions flow, resulting in a transient depolarization or hyperpolarization of the membrane and tr...

Sticking it out with tight junctions

f patience is a virtue, then Daniel Goodenough and Bruce Stevenson earned their wings in the pursuit of the first tight junction protein. Stevenson spent seven years as a graduate student with Goodenough (Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA) before the two worked out the conditions to purify fragile tight junction–enriched preparations from mouse liver (Stevenson and Goodenough, 1984). It was en...