October 2007 news
Oct. 31, 2007
Lesa Beamer's Lab
Ritcha Chaudhary, postdoctoral fellow in the Beamer laboratory, presented a poster entitled "Crystallization of enzyme-substrate complexes of phosphoglucomutase from Salmonella typhimurium" at the Midwest Enzyme Chemistry Conference in Chicago IL on Sept. 29.Bill Folk's Lab
MU Maps Course for Improving Pre-College Science Education
Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards $750,000 grant to MU School of MedicineHigh school teachers and students in Missouri will be among the first to benefit from innovative, high tech mapping tools and concepts developed at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the Missouri Botanical Garden. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) announced today that it will award a $750,000 grant to the MU School of Medicine to develop these concepts and tools and to help teach students fundamental concepts of human health, biology and medical sciences.
HHMI is supporting the MU program as part of a national initiative to improve connections between research institutions and their communities. Only 30 other institutions received similar grants through the initiative, and MU was one of just six to receive a maximum grant of $750,000. HHMI used a panel of lead scientists and educators to select grant recipients from 127 proposals representing 42 states.
The MU program, called Maps in Medicine, will use geospacial and biological imaging technologies and will work with teachers in three Missouri school districts — the Columbia School District and the Normandy and Parkway School Districts in St. Louis. The program will engage educators and students in developing curricular material that respond to science learning objectives that the state has mandated with a very current approach and understanding of cell biology.
Building on students' sense of direction and understanding of geospatial mapping such as GIS systems, the educators will engage students in lessons that teach them how structures are determined by DNA and conveyed within cells, causing the cells to move through three-dimensional space much as humans move across the earth and through space.
"The basic notion is very simply: young people have a sense of direction and navigation that we wish to employ in helping them to understand how cells develop and how those cells navigate in three-dimensional space as tissues and organizations are patterned during development. We are using this sense of direction, movement and geography that is intrinsic in humans as a metaphor for the instructions that determine movement of cells during development," said William Folk, principal investigator of the project, professor of biochemistry and senior associate dean for research in the MU Medical School.
Maps in Medicine will utilize two interconnected modules: Mapping Health and Mapping Cell Fate. In the Mapping Health portion, students will be introduced to the role of vectors in the transmission of avian influenza virus and how movement of the avian vectors and spread of the virus are monitored at state, regional and global levels. In the Mapping Cell Fate portion, students will learn how cells get instructions to maintain or change their properties (their "fates") and what health problems occur when these instructions are challenged by genetic mutations and pathogens such as the avian influenza virus.
Folk said he expects the five-year project will result in enriched training of teachers, strengthened interest in science among at-risk high school students and the development innovative educational materials that can be disseminated nationally. It will build on several existing MU-led projects, including The International Center for Indigenous Phytotherapy Studies, which also is led by Folk, and funded by a $4.4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how traditional medicines are used in healthcare.
Mark Hannink's Lab
Shih-Ching (Joyce) Lo attended the National Institute of Health National Graduate Student Research Festival, October 10-12. The NIH National Graduate Student Research Festival (NGSRF) is an annual two-day event held on the main NIH campus in Bethesda, MD. The Festival introduces 250 advanced graduate students in the sciences to the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) with the aim of recruiting them to do postdoctoral training at the NIH. Competition to participate in the Festival is intense; in 2006, 964 applications were received. Joyce interviewed several PI's at NIH about their research and initiated a collaboration between my lab and Dr. Michael Lenardo M.D., Chief, Molecular Development Section, Laboratory of Immunology, NIAID, NIH.Joyce also defended her dissertation on October 24, with unanimous approval by her doctoral dissertation committee (Hannink, Sun, Tsika, Guilfoyle and Pintel).
Dennis Lubahn's Lab
Two recent papers:
Zhou W, Lo, S-C, Liu J-H, Hannink M and Lubahn DB. ERRbeta: A Potent Inhibitor of Nrf2 Transcriptional Activity. Molecular and Cellular Endocrinology (2007).Sakla, MS, Shenouda , NS, Ansell PJ, MacDonald, RS, Lubahn, DB. Genistein Affects HER2 Protein Concentration, Activation & Promoter Regulation in BT-474 Human Breast Cancer Cells. Endocrine (2007).
Steve Van Doren's Lab
Congratulations to Dr. Gui-in Lee on her new assistant professorship in Biochemistry at Penn State-Abington. (Gui-in completed her PhD in our lab in 2003.)Farewell to Dr. Anu Shende who moved away to join her husband, Rajesh, in Rapid City, S.D.
Gary Weisman's Lab
Grant award
Laurie Erb, Principal Investigator; Cheikh Seye, Co-InvestigatorR21 exploratory grant from NIH (NHLBI)
"Investigating the role of the P2Y2 nucleotide receptor in inflammation"
09/30/07 – 07/31/09
$410,000