News
Dr. Bradham Awarded New NSF Grant
Biology Department Professor Cynthia Bradham has been awarded a three year National Science Foundation grant from the Division of Integrative Organismal Systems. The title of the research abstract is “The Molecular Basis of Skeletal Patterning” and Professor Bradham is the sole P.I. on the grant.
Dr. Gilmore Gives Plenary Lecture at BCI Symposium
Tom Gilmore, Professor and Associate Chair of Biology, gave a plenary lecture at the 19th Annual
Biomedical & Comparative Immunology Symposium in Miami, FL, on March 31, 2017. His talk, "A Billion Years of NF-kappaB," described his lab's work on a key protein involved in immune diseases from marine invertebrates to humans.
Dr. Segrè Awarded Hariri Institute Research Award
With BU Physics Professor Kirill Korolev, BU Biology Professor Daniel Segrè has been granted a $20,000 research award from the Hariri Institute. The funded project aims to develop a computational tool that can use microbial genomes to predict microbial interactions and ultimately ecosystem dynamics. Beyond prediction, this computational tool will be used to develop design principles for artificial communities and infer microbial interactions in medical and environmental microbiomes. The latter constitutes a major challenge faced by the microbiome research today as interactions are inferred from patterns of co-occurrence in cross-sectional data or temporal correlations in longitudinal data. The computational tool will constrain interaction types using genome-scale metabolic models and remove network motifs inconsistent with the need to co-localize in space. As a result, it will considerably improve the power of sequencing surveys to identify interactions. Congratulations to Professors Segrè and Korolev!
Dr. Segrè Research Featured on Cover of Cell
In a study published on March 9 in the journal Cell, researchers used systems biology approaches to study the emergence of primordial metabolic networks, showing that early biochemistry could have arisen prior to the introduction of phosphate.
The featured article can be viewed here for a short time and the full article can be found here.
Albert Mondragon Awarded the DeLill Nasser Award
MCBB PhD student, Albert Mondragon, of the McCall Lab recently received the DeLill Nasser Award for Professional Development in Genetics for the Spring 2017 for his research characterizing the molecular machinery controlling acidification during cell death and clearance in fruit flies. These awards are given to outstanding graduate student and postdocs to support travel to meetings and laboratory courses. Congrats Albert!
Dr. Khalil Receives Presidential Early Career Award
Assistant Professor Ahmad Khalil (BME) is among 102 scientists and researchers honored as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). The PECASE award is the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers.
“BME is proud to now have two PECASE recipients among our assistant professors, which reflects the extraordinary quality of our young faculty as researchers,” says Professor John White, chair of BME. “It is worth noting that Professor Khalil is also a superb teacher. In his brief career, BME undergraduates have chosen him multiple times as the best professor in the department, and last year he won the award as the best professor in the entire College. We are very lucky to have him among our faculty.”
PECASE selection is highly competitive. Awardees must first receive an early career award from one of the research-funding government agencies. Awardees are then selected by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy based on a nomination process. Nominated by the National Science Foundation, Khalil was recipient of an NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award for a project that aims to use synthetic biology to study and control prions. Most famously known for their role in transmitting neurodegenerative diseases, Khalil is exploring the potential for prions to produce positive and adaptive functions in organisms, such as yeast cells.
According to the announcement by the White House, PECASE recipients are selected “for their pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and their commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education, or community outreach.” Khalil joins fellow PECASE recipient Assistant Professor Xue Han (BME,) who won the award in 2014.
“I’m honored and thrilled to have won this award and be recognized at this level,” says Khalil. “The award is really a reflection of our wonderful collaborations, including with the late Susan Lindquist, the support we receive here at BU, and of course the hard work of the students and postdocs I have working alongside me.”
Dr. Zaman Profiled in Wall Street Journal
BME Professor Muhammad Zaman was recently profiled in the Wall Street Journal. In the article, he talks about the device he has developed to detect counterfeit drugs.
Read the full article.
Dr. Sean Elliott Receives 4 Year National Institute of Health Grant to study “Structure, Function and Diversity in the Bacterial Cytochrome c Peroxidase Family”
Dr. Sean Elliott was recently awarded 4 years of support from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for his research into bCCPs.
The new grant will enable studies in the Elliott Group to dissect the way in which nature has made use of a common motif of bioinorganic chemistry, the iron-bearing structure known as a c-type heme, and to utilize it for diverse chemistry. While Elliott has a long-running interest in heme and redox chemistry, here the group studies the titular ‘bacterial cytochrome c peroxidase’ (or, bCCP) family of enzymes. While prototypical bCCPs are found in gram negative microorganisms where they detoxify endogenous or exogenous hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), the Elliott group has realized that there exist in microbes novel bCCPs which engage in unknown chemistry. In the work sponsored by the NIH, the Elliott group will use a combination of biochemistry, electrochemistry, spectroscopy and structural biology to elucidate the bCCPs found in under appreciated microbes, and attempt to rationalize why the enzymes work as they do.
The work to be supported is a team effort where the enzymes discovered and produced in the Elliott Group will be examined here at BU, but also in collaboration with structural biologists at MIT and spectroscopists at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Michigan.
As bCCPs are enzymes on the front-line of the native defenses of NIH Select List pathogens including Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Burkholderia complex species, Vibrio cholerae, Campylobacter jejuni, and Yersinia pestis, these studies will provide fundamental insight into the long-term development of new antimicrobial compounds that will target the novel features of bCCP structure.”
Dr. Elliott, who is also a two time recipient of the Scialog® Award Research Corporation (2010-2011), and received the 2007 Gitner Award for Distinguished Teaching in 2007 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2005 (among other honors), works with the Elliott Research Group to investigate the interplay between biological systems and redox-active species (e.g., metal ions, organic radicals, disulfide bonds, reactive oxygen species). Their emphasis is on the kinetic and thermodynamic basis for catalytic redox chemistry, as well as the molecular basis of how nature tune redox cofactors do the hard work of Life.
Dr. Damiano Recieves $12M in Supplemental Funding from NIH
Read the full article in ENG News: http://www.bu.edu/eng/2017/01/04/study-supports-final-pivotal-trial-of-bionic-pancreas/
Dr. Arturo Vegas Highlighted in BU Today
Dr. Arturo Vegas was recently featured in BU Today for his research into Type 1 Diabetes. The full article is called “New Targets to Treat Type 1 Diabetes” and there’s an excerpt from the article by Barbara Moran is below.
For more information about Dr. Vegas visit his Faculty Page and for more on his research group visit the Vegas Group Page.
“Type 1 diabetes is rare but devastating. A person’s own immune system attacks the pancreas, destroying insulin-producing tissue and the body’s ability to regulate blood sugar. About five percent of people with diabetes—approximately 1.25 million Americans—have this form of the disease, according to the American Diabetes Association. Unregulated blood sugar can lead to blindness, kidney failure, and death.
Scientists aren’t sure what causes type 1 diabetes, though they suspect that a genetic predisposition, combined with an environmental trigger, causes a sudden disruption in the immune system that causes it to attack the body’s own tissue. The only treatment is a lifetime of careful blood sugar monitoring, with insulin injections as needed.
But what if there were a way to block the immune system before the damage was done, preserving at least some of the pancreas’ ability to produce insulin? That’s the goal of Arturo Vegas, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of chemistry, whose lab combines biology, chemistry, materials science, and engineering to develop targeted therapies for complex diseases like diabetes. He recently was awarded a prestigious $1.4 million Type 1 Diabetes Pathfinder Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to pursue the work.”
Congratulations Dr. Vegas!