2015-05-14
- Sodium ions (Na+) play diverse and important roles in biological processes, and yet few sensors with high sensitivity and selectivity for Na+ over other competing metal ions have been reported. In this study, the authors reported the first highly selective, sensitive, and efficient Na+-specific catalytic DNA and its conversion into a sensor for imaging Na+ in living cells. Their findings have...
2015-05-11 - MCB junior Nhan Huynh has earned an honorable mention in the national Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program.
2015-05-06 - The School of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Microbiology congratulate Dr. Brenda A. Wilson, professor of microbiology, on her 2015 Leadership Award, which she received from the YWCA of the University of Illinois at an awards ceremony on April 23rd.
2015-05-06 - The Department of Biochemistry congratulates first-year graduate student Mara Livezey on winning a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. The fellowship provides three years of pre-doctoral funding, which will support her work in Professor David Shapiro’s lab.
2015-04-17 - Biochemistry graduate student Pei Wang and Associate Professor Raven Huang have discovered a new bacterial RNA repair complex. The structure of the 270-kDa RNA repair complex revealed that it is built like a shopping mall, and RNA repair can be achieved having the damaged RNA visiting four active sites with a minimum travelling distance. The findings are published in Nature Communications.
2015-04-07 - The microbes could surrender to the harmless virus, but instead freeze in place, dormant, waiting for their potential predator to go away, according to a recent study by Associate Professor of Microbiology Rachel Whitaker in mBio.
2015-04-06 - Biochemistry researchers in Dr. David Shapiro's lab, and a study team including researchers from the department of food science and human nutrition, the department of molecular and integrative physiology, the College of Medicine and the Cancer Center, have developed a new drug that kills estrogen receptor-positive cancers in mice. The findings are published in a recent edition of PNAS.
2015-02-25 - Disassembly of actin filaments is important for many processes that involve rapid reorganization of cell shape such as cell movement and division. Cofilin is a vital disassembly protein however one limitation of cofilin is that it can stabilize filaments at saturating concentrations. Nadkarni and Brieher showed that the amount of cofilin in thymus extract is too high to allow disassembly...
2015-01-23 - An interdisciplinary research team, including molecular and integrative physiology professors Benita Katzenellenbogen and Milan Bagchi, has developed a new approach to treating endometriosis. Their research appears in Science Translational Medicine.
2014-12-18 - The School of Molecular and Cellular Biology and the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology are proud to announce Dr. Phil Newmak’s fellowship with the AAAS, a prestigious scientific society composed of those who have made outstanding contributions to their field.
2014-12-09 - Associate Professor of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, Jongsook Kim Kemper, post-doctoral researcher, Dong-Hyun Kim, and their colleagues discovered that the function of a key metabolic transcriptional regulator, FXR, is modulated by an acetyl/SUMO switch, which is dysregulated in obesity. Elevated acetylation of FXR at Lys-217 in diet-induced obese mice inhibits its SUMOylation at Lys-277...
2014-12-05 - From left, University of Illinois graduate research assistant Manuel A. Ortega, chemistry professor Wilfred van der Donk, graduate student Yue Hao, biochemistry professor Satish Nair, and postdoctoral researcher Mark Walker solved a decades-old mystery into how a broad class of natural antibiotics are made.
2014-11-19 - Large-scale simulations will develop a greater understanding of cellular membrane transporters, which could allow drug developers to design more targeted drugs for major pathophysiological conditions such as psychological disorders, cancer, and multi-drug resistance.
2014-11-13 - Autophagy or “self-eating” is the breakdown and recycling of cellular components and is essential for cellular survival under starvation but must be suppressed upon feeding. Acute regulation of preexisting autophagy machinery by protein phosphorylation is well defined, but longer-term regulation of the synthesis of these proteins is not. The team found that feeding-activated FXR and fasting-...
2014-11-07 - Graduate student Sheena Smith and Professor David Kranz of the Department of Biochemistry have developed an approach to discover T cell receptors that could be therapeutically useful against different cancers. In collaboration with graduate students Yuhang Wang and Javier Baylor and Professor Emad Tajkhorshid, molecular dynamics simulations revealed plausible mechanisms for the “switch” in...