Elliott Associate Professor of Biology Dr. Kristian M. Hargadon ’01 recently completed his nearly two-year role as Editor of a volume, “Melanoma: Methods and Protocols,” that was published this week in the prestigious Methods in Molecular Biology book series. This series, published by Springer Nature/Humana Press, has been the leading series in biomedical protocol publishing since its inception 35 years ago. The volume includes contributions from authors at major research universities and cancer research centers across the world and features protocols ranging from basic research techniques to clinical and veterinary medicine procedures used in the study, diagnosis, and treatment of melanoma.
Among the 45 book chapters in the volume are two chapters authored by Dr. Hargadon that are based on techniques developed/optimized in his research lab at H-SC. The first chapter, entitled “A Flow Cytometric Assay for Investigating Melanoma Cell Adhesion to Lymphatic Endothelial Cells,” is based on a technique developed to study melanoma cell interactions with lymphatic endothelial cells, a process critical to melanoma invasion of regional lymph nodes. This chapter includes former Hampden-Sydney student, Coleman Johnson ’19, as a co-author. The second chapter, entitled “Generation of Functional Gene Knockout Melanoma Cell Lines by CRISPR-Cas9 Gene Editing,” describes an optimized protocol for engineering melanoma cells using gene editing technology and highlights the approach employed by Dr. Hargadon to knock out the Foxc2 gene in a murine melanoma cell line, work that is featured in recent publications by Dr. Hargadon in the journals Cancer Genomics and Proteomics and Frontiers in Oncology. This book chapter also includes 3 Hampden-Sydney student co-authors (Coleman Johnson, Corey Williams ’19, and David Bushhouse ’19) who contributed to this work. Of note, Coleman Johnson and Corey Williams are currently in their second year as medical students at Virginia Commonwealth University’s School of Medicine, and David Bushhouse, a former Goldwater Scholar at the College, is in his second year as a Ph.D. candidate in Northwestern University’s Interdisciplinary Biological Sciences Graduate Program.
The “Melanoma: Methods and Protocols” volume is available at: