The Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department is pleased to welcome our 2022 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship students for 10 weeks of research.

Congratulations to Dr. Alan Diekman, Professor in the departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Urology, who received the Distinguished Mentor Award from the American Urological Association and Urology Care Foundation at the AUA annual meeting in New Orleans on Saturday. The award recognizes Dr. Diekman for his work with medical students in the area of urology research and his long track record of providing an excellent training environment for early-career investigators.

Congratulations to Sayem Miah, PhD who was selected as a KL2 Scholar for the TRI’s KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Scholars Program for 2022-2023. Dr. Miah will receive two years of funded support and mentored translational research training. The program selects scholars through a competitive application process and provides 75% salary support and up to $25,000 a year for research, tuition, travel and education.

Primary acute lymphoblastic leukemia cells are susceptible to microtubule depolymerization in G1 and M phases through distinct cell death pathways.
Delgado M, Rainwater RR, Heflin B, Urbaniak A, Butler K, Davidson M, Protacio RM, Baldini G, Edwards A, Reed MR, Raney KD, Chambers TC.
J Biol Chem. 2022

A shout-out to Dr. Grover Miller, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, on being named as an Associate Editor for the Drug Metabolism and Transport section of Frontiers in Pharmacology. The specialty section covers regulation of drug metabolizing enzymes and transporters, genetic variability and polymorphisms, design of innovative tools for determining drug metabolism and transport, in vitro to in vivo extrapolations, and effective drug design.

Congratulations to Isabelle Racine Miousse, Ph.D. who won the Overall Impact Award for her poster presentation of “Dietary Methionine Restriction Improves the Response to Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors” at the UAMS Translational Research Institute (TRI) Research Day on April 5th.

The Changing Landscape of Systemic Treatment for Cervical Cancer: Rationale for Inhibition of the TGF-β and PD-L1 Pathways.
Birrer MJ, Fujiwara K, Oaknin A, Randall L, Ojalvo LS, Valencia C, Ray-Coquard I.
Front Oncol. 2022

Role and Regulation of Pif1 Family Helicases at the Replication Fork.
Malone EG, Thompson MD, Byrd AK.
Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2022

ZMYM2 restricts 53BP1 at DNA double-strand breaks to favor BRCA1 loading and homologous recombination.
Lee D, Apelt K, Lee SO, Chan HR, Luijsterburg MS, Leung JWC, Miller KM.
Nucleic Acids Res. 2022

Identification of natural compounds tubercidin and lycorine HCl against small-cell lung cancer and BCAT1 as a therapeutic target.
Chen J, Barrett L, Lin Z, Kendrick S, Mu S, Dai L, Qin Z.
J Cell Mol Med. 2022

Researchers at Stanford University generated a list of the World’s Top Two Percent of Scientists using Scopus data and a combination of citation metrics to rate a researcher’s influence in their subfield (in parentheses below) over the course of their career, through 2019. (Citation metrics included h-index, coauthorship-adjusted hm-index, citations to papers with different authorship positions, and a composite indicator.) Updated databases and code are freely available in Mendeley; the latest version, Version 3, was published on October 19, 2021. Congratulations to the Biochemistry Faculty included on the list, Michael J. Birrer, M.D., Ph.D., and Donald M. Mock, M.D., Ph.D.

The publicly available database ranks the top 100,000 researchers (out of nearly seven million who had published at least five papers) across 22 scientific fields and 176 subfields according to the composite citation index when self-citations were or were not included. The database also includes researchers not in the top 100,000 according to the composite index but who were still within the top two percent of scientists in their subfield and had published at least five papers.

Congratulations to Shreyam Tripathi for winning the poster category at the 2022 Arkansas Regional Junior Science and Humanities Symposium (JSHS). Mr. Tripathi is a junior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts (ASMSA) who has been working in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Eoff at UAMS. At the JSHS, Mr. Tripathi presented a poster entitled “Investigating the role of Rev1 in maintaining accurate DNA replication past G4 containing regions in the leading and lagging strands” detailing experiments he performed in the Eoff lab with guidance from Dr. Amit Ketkar.

The Arkansas Regional JSHS was held at Arkansas Tech University on March 11-12 and is a Tri-Service STEM competition sponsored by the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force. The study was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (MCB 1903357 to R.L.E.) and is part of an ongoing collaboration between Dr. Eoff and ASMSA students and faculty.

Congratulations Shreyam!

NRMN Career Development Webinar Series

Best Practices for Students, Postdocs, and their Faculty Members When Writing an NIH Individual Fellowship Grant Application

Wednesday, April 6 from 2:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Central Time.

In this webinar from the National Research Mentoring Network, Dr. Jamie Robinson from Columbia University will share best practices and tips for writing a NIH Individual Fellowship Grant Application followed by a Q and A session.

Register here.