Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Newsletter · Chair of Biochem-istry of UTMS; Dr ... XYMS of CSU initiated a new formal program entitled ... tion by alternative splicing" report

Biochemistry & Molecular Biology Newsletter

http://www.bmb-med.tmc.edu Fall, 2011

BMB Program Research Retreat

A tradition for more than 30 years, our annual research retreat was held in March 2010 at Camp Allen, a scenic 950 acres in the piney forests of Navasota. Camp Allen offers lodging and conference facilities as well as the opportunity for recreational pursuits such as canoeing, fishing, hiking, tennis and horseback riding. This event was designed to facilitate scientific interaction and provide the opportunity for new recruits to meet other department members.The 2-day event featured scientific presentations by graduate students and postdocs. Prizes were awarded (First prize: $200; second prize: $150; third prize; $100) for the best oral presentations and posters by graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. A student skit provided enter-tainment, followed by a reception. Commemorative T-shirts were issued to all participants.

Student oral presentations1st prize: Susan Daniels2nd prize: Mesias Pedroza3rd prize: Anu Rambhadran

Student poster (3-way tie)1st prize: Thuy Le, Anupama Sataluri, & Sarah May

Postdoctoral Fellow oral presentations1st prize: Harry Karmouty-Quntana2nd prize: Amanda Chadee3rd prize: Takao Miki

Postdoctoral Fellow poster1st prize: Yuegiang Zhang2nd prize: Heidi Vitrac3rd prize: Ju-Mei Li

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BMB PhD Student Graduates

Susan Daniels, a student in the Lee lab, successfully defended her thesis “ Up-take and metabolism of 5’ AMP in the erythrocyte plays key roles in the 5’AMP induced model of deep hypome-tabolism”. Dr. Daniels will do a postdoc with Dr. David D. Moore at Baylor Col-lege of Medicine, doing nuclear recep-

tor research.

Other BMB students receiving their Ph.D. this year were Jordan Bell (Strobel lab), whose thesis was titled “Expression and regula-tion of human cytochrome P450 4F isoforms in  tissue samples and under TNF-alpha challenges” and Mesias Pedroza (Blackburn lab), whose thesis was titled “The role of interleukin-6 in adenosine-mediated pulmonary fibrosis”.

Student/Postdoc Awards

Mousheng Wu, Ph.D., (Zheng lab) achieved the rare distinction of obtaining a 3rd year extension of his American Heart Association postdoc-toral fellowship to continue his high-impact structural studies of a calcium ion transporter protein.  This applica-tion received the top score (0.94th per-centile) and is the only one funded for a 3rd year extension in the southwestern states.

Michael R. Cabanero, (right) a graduating medical student, re-ceived the John A. DeMoss Award for Excellence in Bio-chemistry for achieving the highest score in the 1st year Biochemistry course. Dr. Wil-liam Seifert, course director, presented the award on behalf of

the department.

Harry Karmouty-Quintana, Ph.D. (Blackburn lab) won a post-doctoral fellowship from the American Heart Association, South-west Affiliate “Adenosinergic Signaling Mechanisms in Pulmonary Hypertension”

Kari Brewer (Lev lab) was inducted into Sigma Xi scientific re-

search honorary as an associate member and won the 2011 Shohrae Hajibashi Memorial Leadership Award.Anu Rambhadran (Jayaraman lab) won 1st place in the John P. McGovern Award for Presentation Skills sponsored by GSBS, a 2010-2011 President's Research Scholarship from GSBS, a 2011 Deans Research Scholarship, 2nd place in the 17th annual poster competition of the Neuroscience Research Center, a travel award from the Biophysical Society, and was featured student in the May issue of the Biophysical Society newsletter.Mesias Pedroza (Blackburn laboratory) won 2nd place in the 2011 GSEC poster competition.

Dr. Xu Wang (postdoctoral fellow Putkey laboratory) was one of the two winners of the UT postdoctoral travel award.

Nader Ezzeddine (postdoctoral fellow Wagner laboratory) won 1st place in the 17th annual poster competition of the UT-Houston Neu-roscience Research Center.

Faculty Awards

Zheng (Jake) Chen, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, was awarded a 4-year Scientist Development grant from the National Center of the American Heart Association.  The project is titled “Small molecule probes of circadian coordination of cardiometabolic functions”.

Michael Blackburn, PhD, Professor, was named the winner of this year's Paul E. Darlington Award for Outstanding Mentoring by a GSBS Faculty. Eric Wagner, PhD, Assistant Professor was named the winner of this year's T.C. Hsu Faculty Research Award in Genetics/Cell Biology for his research on RNA metabolism and function.

Vasanthi Jayaraman, Ph.D., Associate Professor, received grants from The Gulf Coast Consortium/Welch Foundation “Se-lective Agonists and Antagonists for AMPA Receptors” and the American Heart Association, Southwest Affiliate “Glutamate Receptor Modulation.” Rodney Kellems, Ph.D., Professor and Chairman, and Yang Xia, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor are co-PI’s on an NIH Chal-lenge grant “Autoantibodes in Preeclampsia: Pre-symptomatic markers and therapeutic targets.” Pawel Penczek, Ph.D., Professor, was awarded a grant from the NIH/ New York Structural Biology Center “Transcontinental EM Initiative for Membrane Protein Structure.”

Eric Wagner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, received a Department

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of Defense grant “Avoiding microRNA Function through Alterna-tive Polyadenylation in Prostate Cancer.” Lei Zheng, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, obtained a new NIH grant “Ca2+ Transport Mechanism of CaCA Protein Family.”

Ann-Bin Shyu, Ph.D., Professor and Jesse H. Jones Chair, re-ceived an NIH RO1 grant for 4 yrs. entitled: "Translational Regu-lation in Bronchial Epithelial Cells".

John Spudich, Ph.D., Professor and Robert A. Welch Chair, re-ceived funding from the Hermann Eye Fund to support research on "Channelrhodopsins for Vision Restoration".

From left to right: Dr. Xia; Dr. Xiao, Dean of School of Public Health of CSU; Dr. Kellems, Chair of Biochem-istry of UTMS; Dr. Sun, President of XiangYa Hospi-tal; Dr. Stancel, Dean, GSBS; Dr. Tian, Chancellor of CSU.

Dr. Yang Xia’s laboratory has trained two postdoctoral fellows and 3 graduate students from Xiangya Medical School (XYMS) of Central South University (CSU), one of the oldest and best known medical schools in China. The President and Dean of XYMS of CSU recently visited our medical school and were very impressed by our facilities and training opportunities. After see-ing the success of the first five trainees from their university to conduct research in the Xia lab, the executive administration of XYMS of CSU initiated a new formal program entitled   Out-standing Young Scholars of CSU and agreed to sponsor selected graduate students or physician scientists from CSU to receive training at the UTHSCH.   Dr. Xia has been selected as the initial Program Director for this program.

Faculty Presentations

Mikhail Bogdanov, Ph.D., Research As-sociate Professor in the Dowhan laboratory presented an invited talk on “Lipochaper-ones: Teaching Acrobatics To Membrane Proteins” at an EMBO Conference held in Santa Margherita di Pula, Italy. He was also a Member of the Organizing and Pro-gram Committee and presented two lec-

tures: “Lipid-assisted Membrane Protein

Folding” and “Lipochaperones  and Lipid-linked Protein Folding Disorders” at the major International Conference “From Scalpel toward Genome, Proteome and Lipidome”, dedicated to the 50th Anniversary of the Nobel prize for the DNA double helix structure held in Kazan, Russian Federation. Also he presented invited re-search seminars at Kazan Federal University as well as the Univer-sity of Freiburg (Germany) and Bristol University (UK). He is scheduled to present a research seminar at Cleveland State Univer-sity and has been invited to join the Organizing Committee of an International Conference  “Nanobiophysics-2011” (Kiev, Ukraine) and present a plenary lecture at this conference.

William Dowhan, Ph.D., Professor and John S. Dunn Sr. Chair, presented invited talks on how phospholipid composition influences membrane protein structure including the keynote address at the NIH Road Map Meeting on Membrane Protein Technologies in La Jolla, CA, the British Biochemical Society Symposium on Advances in Membrane Biochemistry held in Cambridge England and the Gordon Research Conference on Molecular and Cellular Biology of Lipids in Waterville, NH.

Irina Serysheva, Ph.D., Associate Professor, presented an invited talk at the Gordon Research Conference on her cryo-EM studies (see below) of the IP3 receptor.

Eugenia Mileykovskaya, Ph.D., (Research Associate Professor, Dowhan lab) gave a talk on cardiolipin membrane domains at the meeting of the Bacterial Interest Group comprised of scientists from UT Health, Rice University and the University of Houston. The initial discovery of these domains was made in the Dowhan lab.

High-Profile Papers from BMB ProgramMembers

William Dowhan, Ph.D., will have two of his research articles fea-tured in the Journal of Biological Chemistry Classics series.  This series will feature about 300 articles that were published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry since 1905 that were deemed as seminal contributions to their fields.  These articles are: Aitken, J.F., van Heusden, G.P.H., Temkin, M. and Dowhan, W. “The gene en-coding the phosphatidylinositol transfer protein is essential for cell growth” (1990) and Bogdanov, M., Sun, J., Kaback, H. R. and Dowhan, W. “A phospholipid acts as a chaperone in assembly of a membrane transport protein” (1996).

Yang Xia, M.D., Ph.D., Associate Professor, in a recent 2011 issue of Nature Medicine described the detrimental role of elevated adenosine in sickle cell disease.   Data presented in the article showed that chronic activation of the A2B adenosine receptor on red blood cells initiates an intracellular signaling pathway that promotes hemoglobin S deoxygenation and subsequent polymerization, re-sulting in increased sickling and hemolysis. This article was high-

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lighted in the News and Views section of the Journal.

The Spudich lab has identified a new light-gated ion channel with improved properties for photoactivation of neuron firing.   {E.G. Govorunova, E.N. Spudich, C.E. Lane, O.A. Sineshchekov, & J.L. Spudich, New channelrhodopsin with a red-shifted spectrum and rapid kinetics from Mesostigma viride. mBio 2:1-9, e00115-11 (2011)}. Within a few days after its publication several neurosci-ence laboratories requested the gene for use as an optogenetic tool in brain circuitry mapping. UTHealth has applied for a patent.

Another research article from the Spudich lab in collaboration with Prof. Ah-lim Tsai, also a member of the BMB Program, was evalu-ated by the Faculty of 1000 and placed in their library of the top 2% of published articles in biology and medicine. {J. Sasaki, A.L. Tsai, & J.L. Spudich. Opposite displacement of helix F in attractant and repellent signaling by sensory rhodopsin-Htr complexes.  J. Biol. Chem. 286:18868-18877 (2011).}

Vasanthi Jayaraman, Ph.D., Associate Professor and BMB Pro-gram Director, reported a structural study of the ligand binding do-main of the AMPA receptor: Landes, C.F., Rambhadran, A., Taylor, N.J., Salatan, F., Jayaraman, V. Structural Landscape of the isolated ligand binding domain of the AMPA receptor studied by single-molecule FRET. Nature Chem. Biology 7, 168-73 (2011).

Irina Serysheva, Ph.D., Associate Professor, has reported a sub-nanometer resolution electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM) structure of a fully functional type 1 IP3 receptor in the closed state.  This work, titled Flexible Architecture of IP3R1 by Cryo-EM will be published in the journal Structure (Cell Press).

Also in the Cell Press journal Structure, Lei Zheng and coworkers, in an article titled “Structural basis of the Ca2+ inhibitory mecha-nism of Drosophila Na+/Ca2+ exchanger CALX and its modifica-tion by alternative splicing" report the first crystal structures of the complete Ca2+ regulatory domain from the Na+/Ca2+ exchanger protein family.

New Vice-Chair of BMB Department

Dr. Rodney Kellems, Professor and Chairman, announces the appointment of Michael Blackburn, Professor, as Vice Chair of the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, effective September 1, 2011.  In this capacity, he will assist the Chairman in implementing various initia-tives in the department. Dr. Kellems thanks Julia Lever, Professor, for her valuable service as Vice Chair for the past several years.

2011 Research Seminar Schedule

September 12, 2011Dr. Konstantin V. KandrorBoston University School of Medicine “mTORC1 and Lipid Partitioning”Host: Dr. DowhanSeptember 19, 2011Dr. Hiro FurukawaCold Spring Harbor Laboratory “Structural Dissection of NMDA Receptor Pharmacology ”Host: Dr. JayaramanSeptember 26, 2011Dr. Matthew BakerBaylor College of Medicine “TBA”Host: Dr. SeryshevaOctober 17, 2011Dr. Nancy WeigelBaylor College of Medicine “Targeting Androgen Receptors in Hormone-Dependent and Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer”Host: Dr. Carpenter

October 24, 2011Dr. Kendal HirschiBaylor College of Medicine “TBA”Host: Dr. Zheng

October 31, 2011Dr. Judith CampbellCalifornia Institute of Technology“TBA”Host: Dr. Carpenter

November 7, 2011Dr. John CrispinoNorthwestern University“TBA”Host: Dr. Jin

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Arrivals and Departures

New graduate students in the BMB program include Swarma Ramaswamy (top row, 1st from left) and Rita Sirrieh (top row, 2nd from left; both in the Jayaraman lab) Luis Acero (top row, 3rd from left; Blackburn lab), Anupama Sataluri (top row, 4th from left) and Natoya Peart (bottom row, 1st from left; both in the Wagner lab), Frank Huang (bottom row, center; Shyu lab) and Vinay Nath (bottom row, right; Lee lab).  Rita received her B.S. degree in Biochemistry from the Univer-sity of Houston.  Luis hails from the San Francisco Bay area and received his M.S. from the University of Cincinnati.  Vinay is from India where he re-ceived a bachelor’s in Engineering followed by an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.  Swarma re-ceived her undergraduate degree in Technology in India.

Among the new postdocs are Dan-ielle Martinez, Ph.D. (Shyu lab) and Baokun He, Ph.D. (Chen lab).  Dr. He received a Ph.D. in Pharma-cology in China and is experienced in small molecule studies.  Also joining the Chen lab is Eun Hyeon Song, M.S. from Korea.  Ms. Song has already published 8 research articles in well-regarded journals on plant signaling pathways and metabolic diseases in mice. Pictured are Dr. He (left) and Ms. Song right).

Nicholas Parchim is a new M.D., Ph.D. student currently doing a research rotation in the Xia lab.  His undergraduate degree is from Loyola University in New Orleans, LA.

After a highly productive stint in the Chen lab, Keon-Hee Kim, Ph.D., took maternity leave and relocated with her husband to Ore-gon.

Roxanna Irani, M.D., Ph.D., a former Xia lab member, is in Philadelphia doing a residency in OBGYN at Drexel University.

About Our Organization The Graduate Program in Biochemistry and Molecu-lar Biology was established to promote excellence in the scientific pursuits by providing graduate educa-tion in an environment that fosters interactions be-tween students and faculty.

The goal of the BMB Program is to develop researchers who have a broad awareness of the content and problems of the biomedical sciences and can apply their experiences to pro-duce new knowledge in the areas of academia and industry.

Acknowledgments: Drs. Julia Lever and Alan Levine prepared this newsletter. We wish to thank all those who contributed information and pictures to make this news-letter possible.

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