In the long-term battle between a herpesvirus and its human host, a University of Massachusetts Amherst virologist and her team of students have identified some human RNA able to resist the viral takeover – and the mechanism by which that occurs.

This discovery, described in a paper published Feb. 17 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, represents an important step in the effort to develop anti-viral drugs to fight off infections.

“This paper is about trying to understand the mechanism that makes these RNA escape degradation,” says senior author Mandy Muller, assistant professor of microbiology. “The next step is to figure out if we can manipulate this to our advantage.”

How and why some RNA are able to escape the viral degradation are questions Muller’s team – including lead author and graduate student Daniel Macveigh-Fierro and co-authors and undergraduates Angelina Cicerchia, Ashley Cadorette and Vasudha Sharma – has been investigating. The research was supported by a $1.9 million Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) to Muller in 2020 from the NIH’s National Institute for General Medical Sciences. Read more

Jennifer Rauch, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology, is collaborating on a two-year, $700,000 National Institutes of Health grant to develop a new technology to treat Alzheimer’s disease, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and other neurodegenerative diseases.

Rauch will be working with grant recipient Novoron Bioscience, a San Diego-based biotechnology company that seeks to develop therapies to reverse central nervous system damage, and Kenneth Kosik of the University of California, Santa Barbara, in whose neurobiology lab Rauch conducted research as a post-doc.

Based at the Institute for Applied Life Sciences, whose mission is to translate science into technologies and services that benefit human health and well-being, the Rauch Lab focuses on the neurodegenerative protein tau, which aggregates in neurofibrillary tangles that are correlated with cognitive decline. With the NIH funding, Novoron will test new technology aimed at reducing the spread of tau by targeting LRP1, a cellular receptor for tau.

Rauch was the first author of a paper published in Nature that described the discovery of the central role of LRP1 in tauopathy. By targeting the molecule that regulates the transport and spread of tau within the brain, Novoron hopes to develop a novel, effective  approach to treat Alzheimer’s disease, which affects some 25 million people worldwide, and other tauopathies. Read more

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the preeminent scientific institution in the United States, the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals, has elected two professors from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to the newest class of AAAS Fellows, among the most prestigious honors bestowed by the scientific community.

Tricia Serio, associate chancellor for strategic academic planning, dean of the College of Natural Sciences and professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Lynmarie Thompson, director of the Chemistry-Biology Interface Program and professor in the Department of Chemistry, will join 562 other scientists, engineers and innovators from 24 scientific disciplines in this year’s class of AAAS Fellows.

Serio’s research is focused on a particular set of cellular proteins, called “prions,” that can change their shape. When their shape changes, so does their function within the cell, and sometimes these shape-shifting proteins can cause serious illness, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. “What we want to understand,” says Serio, “is why proteins change their shape, and if they can switch in one direction, causing disease, can they switch back to a healthy state?”

Thompson also studies cellular proteins, though the focus of her work is on proteins in the membrane of a cell. Membrane proteins are responsible for many of the cell’s processes, from harnessing energy to communicating with other cells and sensing the environment. Her lab investigates chemotaxis receptors that sense the environment and can direct the swimming of bacteria, and form protein arrays in the membrane that are “symmetrical and beautifully complex,” as Thompson puts it. Membrane proteins are also the targets for a wide range of therapeutic drugs—and yet their structures and mechanisms remain poorly understood.

Serio and Thompson, both of whom are members of the graduate program in molecular and cellular biology at UMass, are also supported by the facilities and intellectual camaraderie of the UMass Institute for Applied Life Sciences (IALS), which combines deep and interdisciplinary expertise from 29 departments on the UMass Amherst campus to translate fundamental research into innovations that benefit human health and well-being. Read more

Jianhan Chen, a University of Massachusetts Amherst chemistry and biochemistry and molecular biology professor, has received a five-year, $2 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to support research in his computational biophysics lab aimed at better understanding the role of intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) in biology and human disease.

The grant falls under the National Institute of General Medical Sciences MIRA program, which stands for Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award. It’s designed to give highly talented researchers more flexibility and stability to achieve important scientific advances in their labs.

“The MIRA award enables us to continue working on several central problems regarding the study of disordered proteins and dynamic interactions. The flexibility of this funding mechanism also allows us to follow new research directions as they emerge,” Chen says. Read more