In March 2022, the United States Senate approved the Sunshine Protection Act, which would make Daylight Savings Time (DST) permanent starting in November of 2023. There was still some healthy debate over whether Americans should accept Standard Time versus DST as their new permanent or keep the current system of “spring forward, fall back.” Regardless of whether we will have DST forever, there is broad consensus that the clock switch every March and November is disruptive to our sleep patterns and our circadian rhythms.

Whether to save energy, increase night-time Trick-or-Treat hours on Halloween, get those few extra minutes of sun to squeeze in the last innings of a Little League or high school baseball game, or just to normalize our sleep patterns, even a seemingly obscure issue like switching between standard time and DST is tied to our health and well-being in our society. And this is why we have to consider how sleep and the circadian rhythm can affect our physiology.

The 2021 Nobel Prize in Physiology of Medicine was awarded jointly to David Julius, of the University of California at San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, a neuroscience researcher at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Working independently, Julius and Patapoutian discovered the key receptors (TRPV1, TRPM8, Piezo1, and Piezo2) in our bodies that sense heat, cold, and touch. Their work not only helps us to understand how we perceive and adapt to the surrounding world, but also paves the way for drug discoveries that target a wide range of diseases, including chronic pain, respiratory disease, and cancer.

Cancer remains one of the most prevalent and deadly diseases affecting humanity. According to the Centers For Disease Control, cancer was the second leading cause of death in 2020 for Americans behind heart disease. The American Cancer Society projects at least 600,000 deaths due to cancer each year, despite the fact that mortality continues to decrease each year. The majority of these deaths are from advanced cancer, which are cancers that do not respond well to treatment and therefore cannot be cured. It is when the advanced cancer progresses to a point where it can escape the primary tumor site, a process known as metastasis, that the prognosis becomes grim.

When I was an aspiring (much younger) scientist, one of the challenges was finding quality antibodies to accommodate our research group’s high-throughput Western blotting platform ¹ while studying signaling pathways in cancer cell lines. When I got into marketing, I learned about ABclonal’s high-quality, high-specificity, and high-affinity antibody products. I really wish that I had access to these products when I was doing my thesis research! With a team of passionate, capable scientists supporting these quality products, I was thrilled at the opportunity to be part of this company and to help spread ABclonal’s brand to the scientific community.

For the first installment of our ABclonal Webinar Series on August 26th, we had the privilege of inviting Dr. Yong Xu of the Baylor College of Medicine to share his research on neuroendocrine mechanisms for appetite regulation and their implications on conditions such as obesity. If you were unable to attend the live session or would like to re-watch to review some of Dr. Xu's key points, we've got you covered with a link to a recording of the webinar and Q&A here, as well as recap of his lecture below.

There is no doubt that the coronavirus is the hottest topic as of late, having dominated media headlines and having fundamentally changed the way that we live and work. As the outbreak of the coronavirus continues to worsen across the globe, the demand for COVID-19 detection is therefore ever-increasing.