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November/December 2014 Newsletter

Leslie Leinwand named Distinguished Professor

BioFrontiers' Chief Scientific Officer Leslie Leinwand was recently named a Distinguished Professor at the University of Colorado. This is the most prestigious honor for faculty at the university, and goes to faculty who demonstrate exemplary performance in research or creative work, show a record of excellence in classroom teaching and provide outstanding service to their professions.

Leslie was one of six faculty members from across the four-campus CU system to be honored this year. CU President Bruce Benson reviews the nominations, then the CU Board of Regents votes on each nominee. 

Leslie was recognized for her work in the personalized treatment of heart disease, and as an international leader in the study of the molecules involved in muscle contraction and their roles in muscle disease. Her strong commitment to teaching and developing biomedical research policies were also noted.

The Distinguished Professor program was established in 1977. There are now 79 faculty members with the title, including BioFrontiers' Leinwand, Tom Cech and Kristi Anseth, and Chris Bowman and Marv Caruthers on the BioFrontiers Task Force.
Amy Palmer wins 2014 NIH Pioneer Award

 

Few people think of metals as being vital to our health. Although most people are aware of iron, zinc is just as important, and is involved in a much wider array of biological functions. Ten percent of the proteins used to build our cells, tissues and genes are predicted to bind with zinc. As humans grew in evolutionary complexity, we adopted zinc as a main ingredient to power the creation of our genome. This metal is involved in the susceptibility to illnesses and infections. A lack of it can cause life-threatening diarrhea, a decrease in the ability to heal wounds and delayed growth and maturation in children.

 

"As a graduate student, I studied copper, which is also an essential metal that plays important roles in biology," says Associate Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and BioFrontiers faculty member, Amy Palmer. "After working with copper, I started reading about zinc in the brain. As far back as the 1950s, doctors studied zinc-rich areas of the brain, and nobody was sure what it was doing there. Metal ions, like zinc, play such an important role in biology. They are essential...we can't live without them, but the misbalance of metals is central in many diseases."

 

Palmer was recently awarded a Pioneer Award from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which are given to scientists proposing highly innovative approaches to major contemporary challenges in biomedical research. The Pioneer Award, now in its eleventh year, challenges investigators at all career levels to develop groundbreaking approaches that could have an efficacious impact on a broad area of biomedical or behavioral science. The award will span five years and provide a total of $3.7 million dollars in research funding for Palmer's work.

 

Zinc availability is highly dynamic and Palmer is hoping to find out how it functions at a basic level - in the cell. She is investigating the prospect that zinc may be a global regulator of protein function, which may help to explain why zinc is involved in so many cellular processes. To accomplish this she'll develop new technology to map the zinc proteome and define how changes in zinc affect gene expression and cellular metabolism. She hopes to gain an understanding of how zinc changes as certain diseases progress, which may result in biomarkers that could identify illnesses early on in their development. Learning how zinc interacts in the cell may change how we think about cellular regulation and how nutrition affects cells.

 

Despite the widespread affects of zinc deficiency among humans, it is currently difficult and expensive to test for it in the doctor's office. The World Health Organization estimates that 30 percent of humans are currently zinc deficient, and as many as 800,000 children die every year because of zinc deficiencies. In fact, zinc supplementation is considered to be as important as providing clean water for the prevention of human death in developing countries. Palmer's research into this important metal may bring greater understanding as to how it is used by our bodies, and what it can tell us about our health.

Recent papers by our faculty 

A quantitative comparison of human HT-1080 fibrosarcoma cells and primary human dermal fibroblasts identifies a 3D migration mechanism with properties unique to the transformed phenotype. (PLoS One) - Kristi Anseth

Cardiac valve cells and their microenvironment-insights from in vitro studies. (Nat Rev Cardiol.) - Kristi Anseth and Leslie Leinwand

Controlled local presentation of matrix proteins in microparticle-laden cell aggregates. (Biotechnol Bioeng.) - Kristi Anseth

Dimensionality and size scaling of coordinated Ca(2+) dynamics in MIN6 beta-cell clusters. (Biophys J) - Kristi Anseth

Measuring cellular forces using bis-aliphatic hydrazone crosslinked stress-relaxing hydrogels. (Soft Matter) - Kristi Anseth

Identification of human TERT elements necessary for telomerase recruitment to telomeres. (Elife) - Tom Cech

Malawi polyomavirus is a prevalent human virus that interacts with known tumor suppressors. (J Virol.) - Robert Garcea

Diet and sex modify exercise and cardiac adaptation in the mouse. (Am J Physiol Heart Circ Physiol.) - Leslie Leinwand
Happy Holidays from BioFrontiers!

We wish you a happy holiday season and wonderful 2015!
 
  Upcoming Events 

BioFrontiers Seminar
Donald Hilgemann
UT Southwestern Medical Center
"New perspectives on the biological function of lipid domains: Ca-activated endocytosis, mechanosensing and metabolic stress signaling"
January 13 - 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Butcher Auditorium
Hosted by Leslie Leinwand

BioFrontiers Seminar
Nick Loman
University of Birmingham, UK
February 10 - 4:00 pm
JSCBB-Butcher Auditorium
Hosted by Andrea Stith/IQ Biology

by Jana Watson-Capps & Thomas Cech

Pete Mariner works up the hall from his PhD adviser and one floor down from his postdoc adviser, but he does not work in academia. He is a senior scientist at Mosaic Biosciences, a start-up developing synthetic materials to help wounds heal faster, yet his labs are in the University of Colorado Boulder. They are part of the university's BioFrontiers Institute, an interdisciplinary effort to tackle complex biology and forge connections with companies.

Over the past three decades, academia and industry have been converging philosophically and physically. Thirty-four years ago, the Bayh-Dole Act encouraged US academics to patent their discoveries, work with companies and become entrepreneurs. Policies in Europe have moved in similar directions. Companies increasingly partner with university scientists to enhance their research. In a 2007 survey of life-sciences faculty members from the 50 US universities that receive the most financial support from US National Institutes of Health, just over half of the respondents reported having some relationship with industry. Read the complete article here
CU teams earns Silver Award at premier synthetic biology competition
The 2013 iGEM Team brought home a regional award. The 2014 team competed at the international level.

The International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) event is the top synthetic biology competition in the world and the CU-Boulder team wanted to make an impact at this year's competition in Boston.  Last year's 2013 Buffs iGEM team was successful, winning a North American Regional award for best new BioBrick and publishing their research in ACS Synthetic Biology.

 

The 2014 Buffs iGEM team was confident they could compete at the international level. Unlike previous years, this year the iGEM competition (called a Jamboree) had no regional qualifying round, creating formidable competition: 2,500 undergraduate and graduate synthetic biology researchers from 245 universities across 32 countries. In the end, the CU scientists came home with a Silver medal and an interlab study distinction.

 

The CU iGEM team wanted to tackle the serious problem of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections, like MRSA and tuberculosis, in a way that didn't damage the body's healthful bacterial colonies at the same time. They focused on phage therapy, which is a virus that uses bacteria's cellular resources to reproduce until the host bacteria's cell is eventually destroyed. CRISPR-Cas9 is a phage system that is able to more specifically target the DNA of a bacterial infection, resulting in cell death. What made the CU-Boulder team's efforts even more valuable was their development of a delivery system for the phage therapy. The result is that the CRISPR-Cas9 phage binds to part of the DNA in the cell and cuts the DNA strand, killing the bacteria cell. Read more

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