BCMP SCIENCE NEWS:
1) The Harvard Institute of Proteomics (JOSH LABAER, director)
received a grant of $5,000,000.00 over the next five years from NIH to
create the Protein Structure Initiative Materials Repository (PSI-MR).
In this effort, HIP will manage import, sequencing, storage,
maintenance and distribution of approximately 75,000 plasmid clones
generated by PSI research groups at several locations http://www.nigms.nih.gov/Initiatives/PSI.
Creation of the PSI-MR at HIP will build on the success of the DF/HCC
DNA Resource Core plasmid repository, which is also hosted by HIP and
is supported by the Plasmid Information Database (PlasmID) http://plasmid.hms.harvard.edu.
BCMP Department members are reminded that they are welcome to share
one, a few, or many plasmid clones with the repository. For more
information, please contact Stephanie Mohr stephanie_mohr@hms.harvard.edu.
2) An article originally published in Chemical Communications by
DR. IRVING GOLDBERG has been highlighted in Chemical Biology. “Helical
molecules that bind to bulges in RNA could lead to anti-HIV drugs,
according to research from the US.”
NOTICES:
3) This year’s BCMP Holiday Party will be held on December 15 from
4:30-7:30 in the Faculty Room, Gordon Hall. Mark your calendars and
plan to bring your family!
4) If you haven’t already, be sure to take the Harvard Sustainability Pledge at http://www.greencampus.harvard.edu/pledge.
If at least 50% of the people in your building sign the pledge by
November 23rd, Harvard will purchase renewable energy to offset a
portion of the building's greenhouse gas emissions.
WELCOME:
5) DONG-CHAN OH (Clardy lab)
6) ROBERT GARCES (Wagner lab) received an Honours B.Sc. in
Biochemistry at the University of Toronto in Toronto, Canada. He
completed his M.Sc. in virology in the laboratory of Dr. Christopher D.
Richardson, Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto,
where he studied aspects of the hepatitis B virus, designing a system
to do future viral receptor studies. He then went on to perform
doctoral studies under the supervision of Dr. Emil F. Pai in the
Department of Medical Biophysics, University of Toronto. There, he
undertook two projects, both involved in aspects of cellular
transcription regulation, namely structure biological studies on Kai
proteins from cyanobacteria as well as on the human Rcd-1 protein. In
Dr. Wagner’s lab he is pursuing further structure biological projects.
7) YU LU (Marto lab) received his B.S. and M.S. in chemistry from
Fudan University, Shanghai, China. For his Master’s Degree studies, he
focused on building interfaces between mass spectrometers and various
separation techniques. He then joined Dr. Michael Gelb's lab as a
graduate student in the Department of Chemistry, University of
Washington at Seattle. There, mainly working in his co-advisor Dr.
Ruedi Aebersold's lab at Institute for Systems Biology, he developed a
mass-spectrometry-based method called visible isotope-coded affinity
tags (VICAT), which has been successfully used to quantify trace-level
target proteins at absolute quantity level from complex protein
mixtures. In Dr. Marto’s lab he is using tandem mass spectrometry and
high-efficient separation schemes to look at low-level phosphorylation
profiles in embryonic stem cell self-renewal pathways.
8) ELIZABETH NOLAN (Walsh lab) received her B.A. from Smith
College with a major in Chemistry and a minor in Music. She received
her PhD from MIT in 2006 where she conducted research under the
direction of Prof. Stephen J. Lippard. Her PhD thesis described the
syntheses, photophysical characterization and biological applications
of fluorescent sensors for zinc and mercury. Liz is currently a
post-doc in the laboratory of Dr. Walsh.
9) JOHN POWERS (Daley)
10) WENJUN ZHOU (Gray) received his BS in chemistry at Beijing
University in Beijing, China. He received a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry
at Columbia University in New York City. He studied the polymeric
vitamin B6 mimics and chiral induction in transamiantion with Prof.
Ronald Breslow. In Dr. Gray’s lab he is synthesizing various kinase
inhibitiors and evaluating their properties.
11) QINGSONG LIU (Rando) completed his undergrad at Nankai
University in Tianjin, China, receiving a BS in Chemistry. He received
his Ph.D in Organic Chemistry at Texas A& M University. From 2002
to 2004, he worked on the total synthesis of a macrolide natural
product named apoptolidin with Prof. Gary. A. Sulikowski at TAMU. In
2004 he moved to Vanderbilt University with Dr. Sulikowksi and studied
total synthesis of a type I polyketide type natural product ammocidin
at Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology. In Dr. Rando’s lab he is
using chemical method to study the biological mechanism of vision
cycle.