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Dr. Brenda A. Wilson receives 2015 Leadership Award
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.
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Biochemistry graduate student wins NSF pre-doctoral fellowship
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.
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A new RNA repair complex employing a “one-stop shopping” repair mechanism
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...
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Microbes Scared to Death by Virus Presence
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.
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New drug stalls estrogen receptor-positive cancer cells and shrinks tumors
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...
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New drug compounds show promise against endometriosis
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.
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Jongsook Kim Kemper’s lab discovers that elevated acetylation of FXR in obesity promotes hepatic inflammation, published in the EMBO Journal
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....
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Team discovers how microbes build a powerful antibiotic
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...
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Professor Tajkhorshid Awarded Supercomputing Capacity at DOE National Laboratory
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.
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Professor Jongsook Kim Kemper and collaborators discover FXR and CREB as key physiological regulators of autophagy, published in the journal Nature.
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...