Samantha Kendrick, Ph.D. is featured in on pages 24-25 the quarterly issue of the Lymphoma Research Foundation Pulse magazine for a discussion of her research on diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
“Understanding the molecular processes of DNA repair can help both better diagnose cancer and to progress treatment,” said Leung, an assistant professor in the UAMS College of Medicine Department of Radiation Oncology.
The grant will investigate how signaling molecules on chromatin interact with proteins that repair broken DNA during replication.
“Our DNA encounters damage every day from metabolic byproducts, toxic chemicals and ultraviolet radiation in sunlight. Unrepaired DNA damage can lead to accumulation of mutations, which can cause cancer,” Leung explained. “Our lab aims to understand how cells precisely repair DNA damage at the right place and right time. We study how the DNA damage response is initiated and the mechanism by which DNA repair proteins are brought to the DNA breaks.”
The Research Scholar grant specifically will investigate the regulatory mechanism between a signal on newly replicated DNA and how it brings a specific chromatin modifying enzyme to direct repairs at the site of DNA break at the right time by altering the damaged DNA and proteins landscape.
The new grant follows a $1.9 million funding award in September 2020 from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences supporting Leung’s roadmap project, “Deciphering the Chromatin-based DNA Damage Response Pathway.”
The i-Motif as a Molecular Target: More Than a Complementary DNA Secondary Structure.
Brown SL, Kendrick S. Pharmaceuticals (Basel).
Alkam D, Jenjaroenpun P, Ramirez AM, Beenken KE, Spencer HJ, Smeltzer MS. Infect Immun.
Klejborowska G, Urbaniak A, Maj E, Wietrzyk J, Moshari M, Preto J, Tuszynski JA, Chambers TC, Huczyński A. Bioorg Med Chem.
Alan Tackett, PhD will host Research and Innovation’s 1st gathering for informal networking, casual mentoring at noon on March 2, 2021. The 1st Tuesday of each month, Research Antipasto’s host will share career experiences, stories, answer questions, advise, astound, and amaze…for 20 – 30 minutes. Just show up, have fun, and get to know others in the research community! Hosts will be posted on the research calendar.
Congratulations to Duah Alkam who successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation entitled “Using genome-wide transposon sequencing (TnSeq) to identify osteomyelitis-critical Staphylococcus aureus genes” on January 28th. Duah was a student in the laboratories of Dr. Mark Smeltzer and Dr. David Ussery and is now working as in the UAMS Bioinformatics Shared Resource under the direction of Dr. Stephanie Byrum.
Congratulations to Alan Diekman who was recently awarded a College of Medicine Teaching Excellence Award.
An article by Dr. Giulia Baldini, Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and Dr. Kevin Phelan, Professor of Neurobiology and Developmental Sciences, was one of the top five most-cited articles in the Journal of Endocrinology in 2020. Dr. Baldini and Dr. Phelan coauthored “The melanocortin pathway and control of appetite – progress and therapeutic implications,” which was published in April 2019. Congratulations.
Sayem Miah, Ph.D. is a new Assistant Professor in the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department.
My research vision is to understand how cells perceive signals that vary in healthy and cancer cells and how this perception regulates tumorigenesis and metastasis. My lab will undertake a “systemwide” interrogation of signaling networks using innovative proteomic, biochemical, and genomic techniques – to uncover how the cell decodes information within complex and combinatorial signals. We will apply these approaches to quantitatively understand healthy and cancer cell signaling in cellular decisions. For example, a long-standing biological paradox is that TGFβ signaling, which is thought to be anti-metastatic, can switch to promoting metastasis. But how the anti-metastatic function of TGFβ/SMAD signaling switches to a metastasis promoting factor is poorly understood.
Recently, we reported that breast tumor kinase (BRK), a non-receptor tyrosine kinase (nRTK), which is an oncogene and highly expressed in ~85% of human invasive ductal carcinomas, promotes metastatic potential by phosphorylating SMAD4 in mammary epithelial cells. Another family member of nRTKs, Src phosphorylates TGFβ type II receptor to promote tumor growth and metastasis. Additionally, PEAK1, induces EMT and metastasis in breast cancer cells via TGFβ/SMAD signaling.
This makes nRTKs a viable and promising target for tackling metastatic cancer—if only we knew which specific kinases needed to be targeted in order to block metastatic progression.
I am highly collaborative in nature. I want to see your science and mine flourish. Please reach out if I can contribute in your science, or you in mine.
I never say no to coffee.
I spent first 12 years of my life in a rural village in Bangladesh. It was a full of life and close to nature.
Any Mediterranean food
I love to play Ping-Pong and Soccer.
Congratulations to Dr. Oleg Karaduta who has been appointed to the Editorial Board (section Proteomics) of the Journal of Mass Spectrometry & Advances in the Clinical Lab (JMSACL). Previously Dr. Karaduta received US Young Investigator Educational Grant from the abovementioned Association.
Multi-omics data integration considerations and study design for biological systems and disease.
Graw S, Chappell K, Washam CL, Gies A, Bird J, Robeson MS 2nd, Byrum SD.
Mol Omics.
Urbaniak A, Piña-Oviedo S, Yuan Y, Huczyński A, Chambers TC.
Eur J Pharmacol.
G-Quadruplex loops regulate PARP-1 enzymatic activation.
Edwards AD, Marecki JC, Byrd AK, Gao J, Raney KD.
Nucleic Acids Res.
Gujarathi S, Zafar MK, Liu X, Eoff RL, Zheng G.
Molecules.
