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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Kiyoko Takemiya

A spoonful of sugar helps infection detection

Congratulations to Kiyoko Takemiya, a postdoctoral fellow in Emory’s Division of Cardiology, working with W. Robert Taylor. At the recent American College of Cardiology meeting in Washington DC, she won first place in the competition for an ACC Foundation/ Herman K. Gold Young Investigators Award in Molecular and Cellular Cardiology.

The title of her research presentation was: A Novel Imaging Probe for the Detection of Subclinical Bacterial Infections Involving Cardiac Devices.

Takemiya, Taylor, and their colleagues (including Mark Goodman and Niren Murthy, formerly at Georgia Tech and now at UC Berkeley) developed a fluorescent probe that allows the detection of small levels of bacteria on cardiac devices. The probe was tested in rats, some of which had relatively mild local S. aureus infections. The fluorescent probe (PET is also under investigation) makes use of the properties of maltohexaose, a sugar that is taken up by bacteria but not mammalian cells.

Infection rates for implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers have been rising, according to a 2012 paper in NEJM.

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Quinn Eastman in Heart Leave a comment