Associate professor Alejandro Heuck’s biochemistry lab, in collaboration with Worcester-based Microbiotix, Inc., has been awarded a two-year, $600,000 NIH Small Business Technology Transfer award to develop a high-throughput screening method to identify inhibitors of a bacterial secretion system that attacks human cells by injecting toxins. A treatment based on the inhibitors could act by a new mechanism to enhance the host’s innate immune response to infection, Heuck says. 

His co-principal investigator on the project is Donald Moir, chief scientific officer at Microbiotix, who has many years of experience in anti-infective drug discovery and inhibitors of Type 3-mediated secretion. Heuck himself is an expert in Type 3 secretion-mediated translocation, the assembly of the translocon and its function. Read more

Alicia Timme-Laragy, associate professor of environmental health sciences, has been selected to serve as a member of the Cancer Etiology Study Section for the Center for Scientific Review at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The Cancer Etiology Study Section reviews grant applications related to the causal agents, processes, and cells involved in early events in carcinogenesis. Focus areas include the role of DNA damage, DNA replication stress and DNA repair defects in carcinogenesis. Focus areas include the role of DNA damage, DNA replication stress and DNA repair defects in carcinogenesis. Read more

Saman Nayyab was appointed as a 2020 Research Fellow by the Male Contraceptive Initiative (MCI), a private non-profit foundation whose objective is to advocate for and promote the development of reversible non-hormonal male contraception. MCI Fellows will each receive $100,000 over the next two years to support their research. The support provided to MCI Fellows allows them to focus on the research, publish data, and build the background they need to sustain a long career as an investigator. 

Saman is a PhD candidate in Dr. Pablo Visconti’s lab studying the role of testis specific serine kinases (TSSKs) on male fertility. TSSKs are kinases present in both germ cells and mature sperm, leading to the hypothesis that they are essential for sperm differentiation and maturation. This MCI fellowship allows Saman to learn advanced instrumental techniques and develop impressive collaborations to target TSSKs as novel male contraceptives. Congratulations on this prestigious award, Saman! Read more

One of the new realities in biomedical research is that it’s increasingly difficult to use a general approach to score advances. Now, investigations into disease mechanisms, for example, are often conducted at the molecular level by specialists who dedicate years to interrogating a single protein or signaling pathway.

One such scientist is biochemist Margaret Stratton at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, whose lab reports how they used advanced sequencing technology to clear up uncertainty and determine all variants of a single protein/enzyme known as calcium/calmodulin-dependent protein kinase II (CaMKII) in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory center.

Stratton and first authors Roman Sloutsky and Noelle Dziedzic, with others, report in Science Signaling that they found an unexpected new role for the hub domain, or organizational center of the CaMKII molecular complex. Stratton says, “In addition to this known role, we show that this domain affects how sensitive CaMKII is to calcium; it acts like a tuner for sensitivity. This was a surprise. It opens a whole new area for investigation. We also show evidence for how we think it works at the molecular level.” Read more