Falender Was Enthralled with Richards's Work By Tim Kreiner
			OCTOBER 14, 1999-- Richards’s laboratory investigates a process called signal transduction, which cells use to communicate with one another. "Signal transduction occurs, for example, when light hits the eye," says Falender. It causes a cascade of chemical events that send a message back to the brain so you know what you saw." Falender’s job was to investigate whether a certain signal transduction process--which another lab had discovered expresses the genes Rap1 and Rap2 in the brain--expresses the same genes in the ovary. "Biological systems are very parsimonious," Falender says. "You often find the same chemical pathway being used for different functions--the way PageMaker can be used to design newspapers and also to design calendars." "The significance of locating the gene pathway in the ovary," says Falender, "is that in females, certain hormones are released to control the menstrual cycle, and although a lot is understood about how these hormones act on the ovary, JoAnne is trying to see which genes are turned on and off by which hormones. Learning this will help us better understand ovulation." Richards is now investigating whether the signal transduction process Falender helped to identify is related to other genes or hormones, and all the information must be gathered and analyzed before a final conclusion about the discovery’s significance can be drawn. "I’m continuing to e-mail JoAnne to see what’s going on with the project, and I am going to Kettering every day to see what’s new in the journals, and whether anything is relevant to what I worked on," says Falender.
			Please send comments, questions, and suggestions about Oberlin Online news and feature articles to Linda.Grashoff@oberlin.edu.