Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more
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Keith Wilkinson

IMSD program nurtures young scientists

Guest post from Megan McCall, who works at Winship Cancer Institute. Thanks Megan!

On a Thursday afternoon this past semester, a diverse group of 50 students were listening to a lecture on the art of storytelling by Eladio Abreu, a lecturer in the Biology department. This was an unusual topic for these students, but they sat enrapt, not distracted by cell phones or laptops.

Eladio Abreu, PhD

The weekly seminar was part of the Emory Initiative to Maximize Student Development (IMSD) program, aimed at the professional development of undergraduate and graduate students in STEM fields. What sets this program apart is its commitment to increase diversity in the biological, biomedical and behavioral sciences by nurturing students who may be underrepresented in these fields. IMSD’s associate director Amanda James says the program includes some of Emory’s strongest students.

The two-year, NIH-funded research program has three main goals: preparing undergraduate students for doctoral programs in STEM fields, nurturing graduate students during their matriculation into Emory’s Ph.D. programs and increasing diversity through mentoring. They accomplish these goals by connecting undergraduates and graduates through mentorship, seminars, and career coaching, says Keith Wilkinson, IMSD director and vice-chair of the Department of Biochemistry.

(from left) Lina Jowhar, Max Cornely, Chayla Vazquez, and Jamie Guillen at an Initiative to Maximize Student development meeting.

This meeting included updates from students on their summer research plans. Answers ranged from epidemiology research with a children’s hospital in Philadelphia, to influenza research at Johns Hopkins. In addition to weekly seminars, IMSD offers classes aimed at increasing success post-graduation, workshops for career development, medical assistant programs, and pathways to funded research, a rare commodity for undergraduates. Students who can’t do funded research may use resources that IMSD offers to find other opportunities.

Lina Jowhar is an undergraduate who started the program in her third year at Emory. She is engaged in research on cystic fibrosis, a genetic disorder of the lungs, and she values the weekly meetings, particularly Abreu’s lecture on the art of storytelling. “I love his interactive teaching style,” she says. “He was comfortable letting us know that he changed the examples in his PowerPoint to include Biggie and Tupac which showed me how important it is to connect with your audience.” Read more

Posted on May 19, 2017 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Provocative prions may protect yeast cells from stress

Prions have a notorious reputation. They cause neurodegenerative disease, namely mad cow/Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. And the way these protein particles propagate – getting other proteins to join the pile – can seem insidious.

Yet prion formation could represent a protective response to stress, research from Emory University School of Medicine and Georgia Tech suggests.

A yeast protein called Lsb2, which can trigger prion formation by other proteins, actually forms a “metastable” prion itself in response to elevated temperatures, the scientists report.

The results were published this week in Cell Reports.

Higher temperatures cause proteins to unfold; this is a major stress for yeast cells as well as animal cells, and triggers a “heat shock” response. Prion formation could be an attempt by cells to impose order upon an otherwise chaotic jumble of misfolded proteins, the scientists propose.

A glowing red clump can be detected in yeast cells containing a Lsb2 prion (left), because Lsb2 is hooked up to a red fluorescent protein. In other cells lacking prion activity (right), the Lsb2 fusion protein is diffuse.

“What we found suggests that Lsb2 could be the regulator of a broader prion-forming response to stress,” says Keith Wilkinson, PhD, professor of biochemistry at Emory University School of Medicine.

The scientists call the Lsb2 prion metastable because it is maintained in a fraction of cells after they return to normal conditions but is lost in other cells. Lsb2 is a short-lived, unstable protein, and mutations that keep it around longer increase the stability of the prions.

The Cell Reports paper was the result of collaboration between Wilkinson, Emory colleague Tatiana Chernova, PhD, assistant professor of biochemistry, and the laboratory of Yury Chernoff, PhD in Georgia Tech’s School of Biological Sciences.

“It’s fascinating that stress treatment may trigger a cascade of prion-like changes, and that the molecular memory of that stress can persist for a number of cell generations in a prion-like form,” Chernoff says.”Our further work is going to check if other proteins can respond to environmental stresses in a manner similar to Lsb2.” Read more

Posted on January 20, 2017 by Quinn Eastman in Uncategorized Leave a comment

SUMO wrestling enzyme important in DNA repair

The DNA in our cells is constantly being damaged by heat, radiation and other environmental stresses, and the enzyme systems that repair DNA are critical for life. A particularly toxic form of damage is the covalent attachment of a protein to DNA, which can be triggered by radiation or by anticancer drugs.

Keith Wilkinson, PhD

Emory biochemist Keith Wilkinson and colleagues have a paper this week in the journal eLife probing how a yeast protein called Wss1 is involved in repairing DNA-protein crosslinks. The researchers show how Wss1 wrestles with a protein tag called SUMO on the site of the DNA damage, and how Wss1 and SUMO are involved in the cleanup process.

Three interesting things about this paper:

*The paper grew out of first author Maxim Balakirev’s sabbatical with Wilkinson at Emory. Balakirev’s home base is at the CEA (Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy Commission) in Grenoble, France.

* Since many cancer chemotherapy drugs induce protein-DNA cross links, an inhibitor of cross link repair could enhance those drugs’ effectiveness. On the other side of the coin, mutations in a human gene called Spartan, whose sequence looks similar to Wss1’s, cause premature aging and susceptibility to liver cancer. Whether the Spartan-encoded protein has the same biochemical activity as Wss1 is not yet clear.

*SUMO stands for “small ubiquitin-like modifier”. The eLife digest has an elegant explanation of what’s happening: Read more

Posted on September 9, 2015 by Quinn Eastman in Cancer Leave a comment