Publications by authors named "J William Schopf"

The two basic approaches to elucidating how life began both date from Darwin. The first, that of the experimentalists, stems from Darwin's famous "warm little pond" letter to Joseph Hooker of 1871. This approach, an attempt to replicate the sequential events leading to life's origin, is exemplified by the "primordial soup" hypothesis of A.

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Linking clinical multi-omics with mechanistic studies may improve the understanding of rare cancers. We leverage two precision oncology programs to investigate rhabdomyosarcoma with FUS/EWSR1-TFCP2 fusions, an orphan malignancy without effective therapies. All tumors exhibit outlier ALK expression, partly accompanied by intragenic deletions and aberrant splicing resulting in ALK variants that are oncogenic and sensitive to ALK inhibitors.

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The persistence of leukemic stem cells (LSCs) represents a problem in the therapy of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Hence, it is of utmost importance to explore the underlying mechanisms to develop new therapeutic approaches to cure CML. Using the genetically engineered ScltTA/TRE-BCR::ABL1 mouse model for chronic phase CML, we previously demonstrated that the loss of the docking protein GAB2 counteracts the infiltration of mast cells (MCs) in the bone marrow (BM) of BCR::ABL1 positive mice.

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Ferromagnetic LaSrMnRuO epitaxial multilayers with controlled variation of the Ru/Mn content were synthesized to engineer canted magnetic anisotropy and variable exchange interactions, and to explore the possibility of generating a Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya interaction. The ultimate aim of the multilayer design is to provide the conditions for the formation of domains with nontrivial magnetic topology in an oxide thin film system. Employing magnetic force microscopy and Lorentz transmission electron microscopy in varying perpendicular magnetic fields, magnetic stripe domains separated by Néel-type domain walls as well as Néel skyrmions smaller than 100 nm in diameter were observed.

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The current strategy for detecting evidence of ancient life on Mars-a primary goal of NASA's ongoing Mars 2020 mission-is based largely on knowledge of Precambrian life and of its preservation in Earth's early rock record. The fossil record of primitive microorganisms consists mainly of stromatolites and other microbially influenced sedimentary structures, which occasionally preserve microfossils or other geochemical traces of life. Raman spectroscopy is an invaluable tool for identifying such signs of life and is routinely performed on Precambrian microfossils to help establish their organic composition, degree of thermal maturity, and biogenicity.

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