[Histonet] smad 6&7 controls

[koellingr <@t> comcast.net]

Louise,

Not currently working on it but formerly so this is what I can tell you.  SMAD's are involved in regulatory cellular signalling by TGF-beta and as that was a big area of interest for a former company, this information is from those times.  These are intimately involved in cartilage and bone metabolism and development so your controls might be from bone (mine were plus cell lines) although there certainly are other possibilities.  I pulled from my file a place you might start and is from an orthopedic group.  See Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry in 2005 a really nice report Tasima Hague is first author so easy to PubMed it up.  They did IHC stain for SMAD 6 and 7, have tissues, antibodies, controls, pictures, etc listed so that article can tell you a lot of the information as a starting point.  (OT so do not read on if uninterested).  SMAD6 stands for "mothers against decapentaplegic homolog 6".  SMAD was a combination word from a Drosophila MAD gene and a homolog c.elega
ns gene that started with letter "S" and I forgot what it was.  That brings up the whole concept of the problem of nomenclature of genes as they have been discovered in various species yeast, fruit flies, frogs, fish and mammals and there were attempts to relate them across species.  In fact, in the late 1990's I believe, when this random naming was out of control, a group got together to attempt to bring some standardiztion to the naming of genes (much like when in the early stages of monoclonal antibody development naming became chaotic until the International Workshops started the CD marker system to bring sanity to the chaotic nomenclature).  But the gene people weren't so successful and although there are some standard naming protocols within species, I believe one of the statements they made was something like naming genes and attrributing or relating them across species was essentially hopeless and useless.  So we are stuck with SMAD and Smurf (Smad ubiguiting regulatory fac
tors), Hedgehog (and then Sonic Hedgehog and others),  sevenless (and then son of sevenless SOS  and daughter of sevenless DOS and daughters and sons and mothers of descriptive genes that is completely up to the whimsical nature of the discoverer.

But get that paper from 2005 and it will help you a lot.

dull Raymond Koelling
PhenoPath Laboratories
Seattle, WA
-------------- Original message -------------- 
From: "louise renton" <louise.renton <@t> gmail.com> 

> Hi there, 
> 
> is ANYONE out there doing immuno on the above (or knows something about 
> these proteins) who could suggest which tissues I could use for controls? 
> 
> Much appreciated 
> 
> -- 
> Louise Renton 
> Bone Research Unit 
> University of the Witwatersrand 
> Johannesburg 
> South Africa 
> "There are nights when the wolves are silent and only the moon howls". 
> George Carlin 
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