A cross-disciplinary team of scientists, led by University of Massachusetts Amherst environmental epigeneticist Richard Pilsner, will use a three-year, $1.6 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) to expand research into the impact of phthalate exposure on male fertility. The three-year grant is part of the NIEHS initiative known as ViCTER (Virtual Consortium for Translational/Transdisciplinary Environmental Research). The program aims to stimulate unconventional partnerships among environmental health scientists in an effort to accelerate breakthroughs in research.

The new award’s co-investigators are reproductive biologists Pablo Visconti, a UMass Amherst professor of veterinary and animal sciences, and Sarah Kimmins, associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Epigenetics, Reproduction and Development at McGill University in Montreal. Read more

Peter Reinhart, director of the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences (IALS), has announced the research teams that have been named recipients of the first Manning/IALS Seed Grants. The awards will support next steps in their research such as proof-of-concept studies and business development, fundamental research into new products, technologies and services to benefit human health and wellbeing. Faculty researchers will receive seed funding of $100,000 each over three years, along with business training and mentorship from IALS, the College of Natural Sciences, the Berthiaume Center for Entrepreneurship and the Isenberg School of Management, among others.

Earlier this year, alumnus Paul Manning and his wife, Diane, committed $1 million through their family foundation to establish the Manning Innovation Program. It provides three years of support in advancing a robust and sustainable pipeline of applied and translational research projects from UMass Amherst. The seed grants were awarded after a competitive process that narrowed 35 teams to six winners, including the following MCB faculty:

• Jeanne Hardy, chemistry, “Development of Potent Zika Virus Protease Inhibitors”
• S. “Thai” Thayumanavan, chemistry, and Steve Faraci, “Pre-Clinical efficacy evaluation of liver-targeted, thyromimetic-encapsulated IntelliGels for the treatment of non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH)”
• Neil St. John Forbes, chemical engineering, “Bacterial delivery of therapeutic peptides to treat advanced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC)
• Shelly Peyton, chemical engineering, “GelTech” to enable tissue-specific drug discovery and help eliminate potential false-positive hits from screening

Molecular and cellular biology doctoral student Samar Mahmoud was recently named a Gilliam Mentor Training Fellow by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), an award that will support her early scientific career in the lab of Peter Chien, biochemistry and molecular biology. She will receive funds for a stipend and education costs, while Chien will embark on a year of mentor training from HHMI. The goal is to improve faculty mentoring skills, support new scientific leaders and foster diversity and inclusion in science, the institute points out.

Mahmoud and Chien are one of 44 advisor student pairs awarded the coveted fellowship in 2019. Read more

Cell biologist Thomas Maresca and senior research fellow Vikash Verma at the University of Massachusetts Amherst say they have, for the first time, directly observed and recorded in animal cells a pathway called branching microtubule nucleation, a mechanism in cell division that had been imaged in cellular extracts and plant cells but not directly observed in animal cells. Details appear this month in the Journal of Cell Biology.

In this work supported by NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the researchers set out to explore specific mechanics of cell division, what Verma calls “the rules of faithful and complete division,” in fruit fly cells. In particular, they want to understand how structures called microtubules help to define where the cell splits in half during the division process. Read more