News

A shout-out to MD/PhD student Lauren “Clai” Morehead, who just received a 2022 Medical Student Research Award from the Melanoma Research Foundation. The grant is the latest honor for Clai, who has presented nationally and garnered acclaim for her research into potential treatments for melanoma with mentors Dr. Alan Tackett and Dr. Isabelle Racine Miousse in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute. Well done!

The Melanoma Research Foundation (MRF) has been awarding Medical Student Research Grants since 2011 and since that time, 80 grants have been awarded to students at 46 different institutions. The purpose of this one-year, $3,000 grant is to promote research opportunities to medical students early in their careers by funding clinical or laboratory-based research projects focused on better understanding the prevention, biology and treatment of melanoma, including cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, pediatric, etc.

Discovery of Novel Reductive Elimination Pathway for 10-Hydroxywarfarin.
Pouncey DL, Barnette DA, Sinnott RW, Phillips SJ, Flynn NR, Hendrickson HP, Swamidass SJ, Miller GP.
Front Pharmacol. 2022

The anti-COVID-19 Drug Remdesivir Promotes Oncogenic Herpesviruses Reactivation through Regulation of Intracellular Signaling Pathways.
Chen J, Dai L, Kendrick S, Post SR, Qin Z.
Antimicrob Agents Chemother. 2022

Multiomic analysis identifies CPT1A as a potential therapeutic target in platinum-refractory, high-grade serous ovarian cancer.
Huang D, Chowdhury S, Wang H, Savage SR, Ivey RG, Kennedy JJ, Whiteaker JR, Lin C, Hou X, Oberg AL, Larson MC, Eskandari N, Delisi DA, Gentile S, Huntoon CJ, Voytovich UJ, Shire ZJ, Yu Q, Gygi SP, Hoofnagle AN, Herbert ZT, Lorentzen TD, Calinawan A, Karnitz LM, Weroha SJ, Kaufmann SH, Zhang B, Wang P, Birrer MJ, Paulovich AG.
Cell Rep Med. 2021

By David Robinson

Jan. 26, 2022  — Kevin D. Raney, Ph.D., a research leader at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (UAMS), has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the Science family of journals.

Raney is professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the UAMS College of Medicine. He joins the 2021 class of 564 scientists, engineers and innovators from around the world spanning 24 disciplines for their scientifically and socially distinguished achievements.

“We were delighted in the College of Medicine that Dr. Raney has been recognized for his distinguished achievements to advance science,” said Susan S. Smyth, M.D., Ph.D., UAMS executive vice chancellor and dean of the college. “Dr. Raney is an outstanding leader and scientist.”

Election as an AAAS Fellow is an honor bestowed upon AAAS members by their peers. Raney is being recognized in the chemistry category for his important contributions to the field of molecular motor proteins on nucleic acids and the function of G-quadruplex nucleic acids during response to cellular stress.

The new Fellows will be featured in the AAAS News & Notes section of this month’s Science journal, and will be celebrated later this year during an in-person gathering when it is feasible from a public health and safety perspective.

AAAS is the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science, as well as Science Translational Medicine; Science Signaling; a digital, open-access journal, Science Advances; Science Immunology; and Science Robotics. AAAS was founded in 1848 and includes more than 250 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. The nonprofit AAAS is open to all and fulfills its mission to “advance science and serve society” through initiatives in science policy, international programs, science education, public engagement, and more. For additional information about AAAS, visit www.aaas.org.

By Marty Trieschmann

Jan. 6, 2022 | Kirk West, Ph.D., a Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute researcher, is the first UAMS scientist to be awarded the prestigious American Cancer Society (ACS) Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Only 18% of ACS fellowships are funded from a nationwide pool of applicants. The three-year fellowship will help fund West’s research on the role of LC8-TLK1/2 axis in the DNA repair pathway in the ACS-funded laboratory of his mentor, Justin Leung, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Radiation Oncology.

West is a graduate of Arkansas Tech University and completed his Ph.D. at UAMS in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 2018 under the mentorship of Alan Tackett, Ph.D. West is a native of Lamar, Arkansas.

“This prestigious award speaks volumes to the potential of Dr. West in cancer research and the cutting-edge research environment in Dr. Leung’s laboratory and the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute,” said Tackett, the Cancer Institute’s deputy director and director of the IDeA National Resource for Quantitative Proteomics at UAMS.

A Functional Precision Medicine Pipeline Combines Comparative Transcriptomics and Tumor Organoid Modeling to Identify Bespoke Treatment Strategies for Glioblastoma.
Reed MR, Lyle AG, De Loose A, Maddukuri L, Learned K, Beale HC, Kephart ET, Cheney A, van den Bout A, Lee MP, Hundley KN, Smith AM, DesRochers TM, Vibat CRT, Gokden M, Salama S, Wardell CP, Eoff RL, Vaske OM, Rodriguez A.
Cells. 2021

Molecular mechanisms for environmentally induced and evolutionarily rapid redistribution (plasticity) of meiotic recombination.
Protacio RU, Mukiza TO, Davidson MK, Wahls WP.
Genetics. 2021

RNA helicases required for viral propagation in humans.
Marecki JC, Belachew B, Gao J, Raney KD.
Enzymes. 2021

Site-Specific Synthesis of Oligonucleotides Containing 6-Oxo-M1dG, the Genomic Metabolite of M1dG, and Liquid Chromatography-Tandem Mass Spectrometry Analysis of Its In Vitro Bypass by Human Polymerase ι.
Christov PP, Richie-Jannetta R, Kingsley PJ, Vemulapalli A, Kim K, Sulikowski GA, Rizzo CJ, Ketkar A, Eoff RL, Rouzer CA, Marnett LJ.
Chem Res Toxicol. 2021

Impact of homologous recombination status and responses with veliparib combined with first-line chemotherapy in ovarian cancer in the Phase 3 VELIA/GOG-3005 study.
Swisher EM, Aghajanian C, O’Malley DM, Fleming GF, Kaufmann SH, Levine DA, Birrer MJ, Moore KN, Spirtos NM, Shahin MS, Reid TJ, Friedlander M, Steffensen KD, Okamoto A, Sehgal V, Ansell PJ, Dinh MH, Bookman MA, Coleman RL.
Gynecol Oncol. 202

CYP2C9 and 3A4 play opposing roles in bioactivation and detoxification of diphenylamine NSAIDs.
Schleiff MA, Crosby S, Blue M, Schleiff BM, Boysen G, Miller GP.
Biochem Pharmacol. 2021

A structural feature of Dda helicase which enhances displacement of streptavidin and trp repressor from DNA.
Byrd AK, Malone EG, Hazeslip L, Zafar MK, Harrison DK, Thompson MD, Gao J, Perumal SK, Marecki JC, Raney KD.
Protein Sci. 2021

Clinical implications of loss of bone marrow minimal residual disease negativity in multiple myeloma.
Mohan M, Kendrick S, Szabo A, Yarlagadda NK, Atwal D, Pandey Y, Roy AM, Parikh R, Lopez J, Thanendrarajan S, Schinke C, Alapat D, Sawyer JR, Tian E, Tricot G, van Rhee F, Zangari M.
Blood Adv. 2021

Utilization of a 3-D tissue engineered model to investigate the effects of perfusion on gynecologic cancer biology.
Martinez A, Buckley MS, Scalise CB, Wang D, Katre AA, Birrer MJ, Berry JL, Arend RC.
J Tissue Eng. 2021

Risk stratification after recurrence of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related and non-HPV-related oropharyngeal cancer: A secondary analysis of NRG Oncology RTOG 0129 and 0522.
Bigelow EO, Harris J, Fakhry C, Gillison ML, Nguyen-Tân PF, Rosenthal DI, Frank SJ, Nair SG, Bahig H, Ridge JA, Caudell J, Donaldson C, Clifford BT, Shenouda G, Birrer MJ, Chen Y, Le QT.
Head Neck. 2021

Milk Formula Diet Alters Bacterial and Host Protein Profile in Comparison to Human Milk Diet in Neonatal Piglet Model.
Rosa F, Zybailov BL, Glazko GV, Rahmatallah Y, Byrum S, Mackintosh SG, Bowlin AK, Yeruva L.
Nutrients. 2021

An article by Dr. Duah Alkam, Assistant Staff Scientist in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology working in the Bioinformatics core, and colleagues has been one of the most popular articles in the journal Microbial Genomics this fall. The article – the journal’s third most read in both October and November – was part of her thesis project for her Ph.D. in the Graduate Program in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Sciences, which she completed earlier this year. As a graduate student, she worked with Dr. Mark Smeltzer, Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, and Dr. David Ussery, Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Great job!

Bethany Paxton won first place in Biological Sciences at the 2021 AR-INBRE meeting. Bethany worked in Robert Eoff’s lab on their NSF-funded project investigating the role of human Rev1 in G4 replication. This was her first scientific conference. Great job, Bethany!

Is amplification bias consequential in transposon sequencing (TnSeq) assays? A case study with a Staphylococcus aureus TnSeq library subjected to PCR-based and amplification-free enrichment methods.
Alkam D, Wongsurawat T, Nookaew I, Richardson AR, Ussery D, Smeltzer MS, Jenjaroenpun P.
Microb Genom.

A highly annotated database of genes associated with platinum resistance in cancer.
Huang D, Savage SR, Calinawan AP, Lin C, Zhang B, Wang P, Starr TK, Birrer MJ, Paulovich AG.
Oncogene.

Raman spectroscopy and machine learning reveals early tumor microenvironmental changes induced by immunotherapy.
Paidi SK, Troncoso JR, Raj P, Monterroso Diaz P, Ivers JD, Lee DE, Avaritt NL, Gies AJ, Quick CM, Byrum SD, Tackett AJ, Rajaram N, Barman I.
Cancer Res.

Biobanked Glioblastoma Patient-Derived Organoids as a Precision Medicine Model to Study Inhibition of Invasion.
Darrigues E, Zhao EH, De Loose A, Lee MP, Borrelli MJ, Eoff RL, Galileo DS, Penthala NR, Crooks PA, Rodriguez A.
Int J Mol Sci.