Renal cell cancer is a relatively common form of human cancer. Tumors develop in the kidney and have a tendency to grow into renal veins and metastasize to distant organs without the spread to regional lymph nodes as is common for many other tumor types.

This particular case shows a papillary form of renal cell cancer that grows with papillary excrescences into cyst formations and with areas of necrosis. The tumor has been stained with an antibody (HPA005785) that recognizes the CD44 protein.

CD44 is a cell-surface glycoprotein and a receptor for hyaluronic acid that is involved in cell-cell interactions, cell adhesion and migration...Read more

Today, we are back in the Tissue Atlas facilities at the Rudbeck lab in Uppsala. Borbala Katona and Maria Aronsson are research engineers in the group working with microscopy and annotation of stained tissues, which we described last week.

Borbala Katona has a bachelors degree in biomedicine and a masters degree in infectious medicine and has been working within the Human Protein Atlas since 2014.

Maria Aronsson has a masters degree in medical biology from Linköping University and joined the Human Protein Atlas in 2012...Read more

More than a century ago, Piccolino M. Cajal published his groundbreaking work on the retina. At that time, Cajal was eager to confirm previous observations he had made in other neural tissues, and he considered the retina very suitable to study due to its simple organization and structure.

The human retina is a multilayered neural tissue that originates from the developing brain, and populates the innermost layer of the eye, called the inner photosensitive layer. The retina is composed of polarized photosensitive neurons called rods and cones...Read more

Today, we start a "mini-series" about our Tissue Atlas here at the blog. Join us on a tour through the lab, meet some of the people working there, and see some really nice images produced by the scientists.

All the work on our Tissue Atlas is done at our Uppsala site, with Cecilia Lindskog as site director. You can learn all about her in one of our previous blog posts.

First we meet research engineer IngMarie Olsson who is group leader for the Tissue Microarray Production, Immunohistochemistry, and Scanning-group...Read more

Researchers from the Human Protein Atlas are planning a clinical trial of a new treatment for nonalcoholic fatty liver disease and type 2 diabetes which harnesses liver cells own ability to burn accumulated fats.

In a study involving 86 patients with varying degrees of fatty liver disease, researchers found that the liver has the ability to burn up accumulated fats. The researchers propose a mixture of substances that will set this process in motion.

Assistant Professor Adil Mardinoglu says the team´s metabolic modeling approach, which relied on data from the Human Protein Atlas project, can be used for a number of chronic liver diseases...Read more

This week we highlight a new structure in the Cell Atlas available in version 16 thanks to the annotations done by citizen scientists in Project Discovery, a mini game within EVE Online. Rods & Rings.

As the name describes, these unique structures that form large rod and ring type aggregates in the cytoplasm that look a bit like sprinkles. Little is known about this structure and the proteins that are involved in it. In fact, it wasn't until 2011 when the term "Rods & Rings" was coined (Seeling HP et al. 2011,Carcamo WC et al. 2011)...Read more

A new research program has been started to produce all the human secreted proteins in mammalian cell factories. The program aims to facilitate studies of this important class of proteins involved in many human diseases.

The human secreted proteins, sometimes called the "secretome", consist of approximately 3000 proteins, which are produced inside our cells and then often transported out to the blood. This class of proteins is important in many central processes in humans, including bacterial and viral defense, inflammation, cell signaling and transport of nutrients...Read more

Today, it is time for the first image of the week from the Cancer Atlas!

Lung cancer is one of the deadliest and most common forms of human cancer. Different forms of lung cancer exist and non-small cell lung cancer is the most common form. The cancer image this week is selected from such a lung cancer that has been immunohistochemically stained for the proliferation marker Ki-67 (MKI67). Ki-67 is the most commonly used immunohistochemical marker in rutin cancer diagnostics. The Ki-67 antigen is expressed in all cell nuclei that are active in the cell cycle and thus positive staining in a tumor cell population reflects the level of proliferation in that particular cancer...Read more