Metaproteomics-An Advantageous Option in Studies of Host-Microbiota Interaction.

PTMViz: a tool for analyzing and visualizing histone post translational modification data.

Persistent bone marrow minimal residual disease as a “high-risk” disease feature in multiple myeloma.

The Graduate School held a virtual hooding ceremony for the 2021 graduates on Thursday, May 13. Six students from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department completed their doctorate this year. Dr. Dustyn Barnette was hooded by his mentor, Dr. Grover Paul Miller at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Dr. Megan Reed was hooded by her mentor, Dr. Robert Eoff, and Dr. Andrea Edwards-Azumara was hooded by her husband. Dr. Edwards-Azumara’s mentor was Dr. Kevin Raney.

Also graduating from the BCMB department this year were Dr. Duah Alkam, Dr. Brian Koss, and Dr. Erin Taylor. Dr. Alkam’s mentors were Dr. Mark Smeltzer and Dr. David Ussery. Dr. Koss and Dr. Taylor were both mentored by Dr. Alan Tackett.

Inhibition of tryptophan 2,3-dioxygenase impairs DNA damage tolerance and repair in glioma cells.

Reed MR, Maddukuri L, Ketkar A, Byrum SD, Zafar MK, Bostian ACL, Tackett AJ, Eoff RL.

NAR Cancer. 2021

Image by Evan D. Lewis

New answers to the old RIDDLE: RNF168 and the DNA damage response pathway.

Kelliher J, Ghosal G, Leung JWC.

FEBS J. 2021

Congratulations to Megan Reed who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Mechanisms of DNA damage tolerance in glioblastoma” on April 28. Megan was a student in the laboratory of Dr. Robert Eoff and will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in July under the mentorship of Dr. Analiz Rodriguez and Dr. Alan Tackett. Dr. Reed’s postdoctoral studies will be funded by Health Sciences Innovation and Entrepreneurship TL1 program from the Translational Research Institute.

A National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant will allow UAMS researcher Isabelle Racine Miousse, Ph.D., to ramp up her study of a nutrient that may have a role in the effectiveness of immunotherapy for cancer patients.

Miousse will receive $220,000 per year for up to five years as one of four project leaders at the Arkansas Integrative Metabolic Research Center, a new NIH-funded Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. The university announced April 6 that the center will receive $10.8 million over five years.

The funding will support Miousse’s preclinical cancer studies involving methionine, an amino acid important for human growth and derived primarily from consuming meat.

Miousse, an assistant professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, will test whether reducing dietary methionine can improve results of immunotherapy drugs used to treat melanoma patients.

“This has never been tried in combination with immunotherapy drugs,” Miousse said, noting that immunotherapy alone works remarkably well, but only for 50% of melanoma patients. “So far the results of this research are very encouraging, and I am hopeful that this next phase of study will take us into clinical trials.”

Unlike most cancer treatments, she notes, this one has beneficial side effects.

“Reducing methionine in the diet promotes the metabolism of fats and sugars in animal models,” Miousse said. “Methionine restriction could fight cancer and improve general health at the same time.”

Miousse’s work has been supported by the UAMS Translational Research Institute’s two-year KL2 Mentored Research Career Development Award for promising early career researchers. The KL2 provides salary support, research seed funding of $50,000 and translational research training. The institute is supported by a Clinical and Translational Science Award from the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.

Edward T.H. Yeh, M.D., a cardiologist renowned in the field of onco-cardiology, was named an ARA Scholar, and Alan Tackett, Ph.D., a cancer researcher widely recognized for his work in cancer biomarker discovery, was honored as an ARA Fellow.

Yeh will receive $500,000 and Tackett will receive $75,000 to further their research.

“We are extremely proud to have both a new ARA Scholar and ARA Fellow at UAMS. The leadership demonstrated by Dr. Yeh and Dr. Tackett has made a valuable impact on research programs at UAMS. We are fortunate to have them in Arkansas and look forward to their future successes,” said Cam Patterson, M.D., MBA, UAMS Chancellor and UAMS Health CEO.

The ARA Scholars program helps recruit and support world-class researchers to universities where their work helps strengthen the competitiveness of the state.

The ARA Fellows program recognizes research leaders who are currently working in Arkansas at one of the state’s five research campuses.

“The ARA Scholars program is the cornerstone for our organization and bridges the gap between university research and economic development, while our Fellows program recognizes research leaders who have already made an impact in our state,” said Jerry Adams, ARA president. “We anticipate great things from both Dr. Yeh and Dr. Tackett as they build upon their outstanding research portfolios and explore new paths in the future.”

Yeh joined UAMS in 2020 as chair of the Department of Internal Medicine and the Nolan Family Distinguished Chair in Internal Medicine in the College of Medicine.

From 2000 to 2016, he served as professor and founding chair of the Department of Cardiology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, where he made seminal contributions to understanding the relationships between cancer, chemotherapy agents and heart disease. In 2012, his laboratory discovered that Topoisomerase 2b is the molecular basis of anthracycline-induced cardiotoxicity, upending decades of belief that toxicity to this chemotherapy drug was due solely to reactive oxygen species (ROS) generation.

Earlier, Yeh made important contributions in biochemistry, including the discovery of two ubiquitin-like proteins, SUMO/Sentrin and NEDD8. Both of these proteins are important in regulation of hypoxia-inducible factor stability, DNA repair, heart and lymphoid development, cancer pathogenesis, and sudden death and seizure disorders.

Tackett’s research involves using advanced technology to discover molecular pathways essential for the development of new therapies and finding new biological markers to assist in developing a personalized treatment for each patient’s specific needs.

He is deputy director of the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and holder of the Scharlau Family Endowed Chair in Cancer Research.

In 2020, Tackett was awarded a $10.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) establishing the IDeA National Resource for Quantitative Proteomics as the first NIH National Resource in Arkansas, which serves biomedical researchers across the nation.

Research and Innovation is hosting the next Research Antipasto monthly event (informal online networking, casual mentoring, happy hour-ish get-together) at noon on April  6, 2021. Justin Leung, Ph.D., M.Sc. will host. Justin is an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology with a secondary appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Justin recently received his 3^rd NIH R01. Justin’s research interests include chromatin biology, epigenetics, DNA damage, and more.

On the first Tuesday of each month, Research Antipasto’s host will share career experiences, stories, answer questions, advise, astound, and amaze…for 30 to 60 minutes (or until we all have to catch another meeting). Just log in, have fun, and get to know others in the research community! Hosts are posted on the research calendar.

Leung’s project is a collaboration with Robert Eoff, Ph.D., a professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in the UAMS College of Medicine. Both Leung and Eoff are researchers in the UAMS Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute.

“Our work will potentially provide a fundamental understanding of the molecular mechanism of DNA damage regulation in our body and also reveal potential targets for cancer therapeutic development,” said Leung, an assistant professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology.

Work on the NCI grant, “Mechanistic Characterization of Cell Cycle-Dependent DNA Repair,” focuses on dissecting the molecular mechanism on cell cycle-regulated DNA repair, specifically during early DNA replication. Leung and Eoff hope to identify a key group of proteins known as a histone-mark reader that work together to protect our genetic material from DNA damage.

The NCI grant comes on the heels of Leung receiving a four-year, $792,000 American Cancer Society Research Scholar grant to study DNA repair mechanisms. He will use that grant to investigate how signaling molecules on chromatin interact with proteins that repair broken DNA during replication.

In September 2020, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences awarded Leung a $1.9 million grant in support of the researcher’s roadmap project, “Deciphering the Chromatin-based DNA Damage Response Pathway.”