News
CSB co-hosts Discovery Lecture Series speaker
Mar. 6, 2023—The Department of Biochemistry and the CSB will host Dr. Yifan Cheng, University of California San Francisco (UCSF), as The Discovery Lecture Series speaker on Thursday, March 9, at 4pm in 208 Light Hall. Dr. Cheng is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and professor of biochemistry and biophysics at UCSF. His...
MBTP student feedback meeting scheduled for March 7
Feb. 17, 2023—Molecular Biophysics Training Program (MBTP) Director Walter Chazin will sit down with students to gather feedback on the training program and seminar series. The meeting is scheduled for the regular seminar time slot on Tuesday, March 7, at 12:20pm in 1220 MRB3. This meeting is for ALL students in MBTP Labs and is for students...
CSB Research: Tilting retromer to improve the model
Jan. 13, 2023—Does your protein of interest show favored orientations in cryo-EM? Or perhaps one specific region is poorly resolved relative to another? If so, consider looking into this recent publication from Amy Kendall, Mintu Chandra, Will Wan and Lauren Jackson. Their findings, published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, report an improved model of the retromer...
MBTP and CSB researchers receive MIRA grants
Jan. 10, 2023—Allison Walker and John Yang, both assistant professors of chemistry, have each been awarded a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) to continue their groundbreaking research. MIRA provides support for a five-year period to continue research in an investigator’s laboratory that falls within the mission of NIGMS....
Ivette Perez wins Karpay Award
Nov. 18, 2022—Congratulations to Ivette Perez, of the Iverson Lab, for being named the 2023 recipient of The Karpay Award in Structural Biology. “I am honored to have been selected for this award,” Ivette said. Ivette joined the Iverson lab in the spring 2019, but she was first exposed to various biophysical techniques and structural biology as...
CSB Research: Crystallizing P450 complexes leads to evolutionary implications
Nov. 8, 2022—Did you know that the cytochrome P450 enzyme family is one of the largest found in nature? These enzymes are found in all domains of life and catalyze electron transport for diverse processes like sterol biosynthesis and the activation/detoxification of drugs. Drs. Galina Lepesheva and Jarrod Smith recently published a structural characterization of the CYP51-ferredoxin...
CSB faculty receive awards
Oct. 26, 2022—CSB faculty Steven Damo, Jamaine Davis and John Yang were recently recognized for their work in promoting diversity and inclusion in science, Alzheimer’s research and computational enzyme design. Fisk University Assistant Professor and Chair, Department of Life and Physical Sciences, Steven Damo was awarded a Science Diversity Leadership grant by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI)...
AlphaFold2: Transporting structural biology towards integrative approaches
Oct. 13, 2022—Have you been itching to use AlphaFold to study your protein of interest? You can “model” your study after the work of Diego del Alamo, of the Mchaourab and Meiler labs, who recently published a study of an APC transporter using this technology. Amino Acid-Polyamine-Organocation (APC) transporters are responsible for exchanging amino acids and ions...
Cleaning up the crosslinks in DNA repair
Oct. 4, 2022—Have you ever wondered how cells keep their DNA safe during replication? Does solving biochemical puzzles from protein structures interest you? Then you should read the new findings from the Eichman and Cortez labs. In their paper published in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), Katherine Paulin, Dave Cortez and Brandt Eichman have elucidated the...
CSB Spotlight: Wan Lab
Aug. 11, 2022—Some might say that Will Wan, assistant professor of biochemistry, is “one of our own.” Will completed his PhD at Vanderbilt University in the CSB lab of Gerald Stubbs, professor of biological sciences, emeritus. Will began his scientific studies at Binghamton University earning a bachelors degree in biochemistry and completed two postdoctoral fellowships in Germany....
CSB awarded NIH S10 grant
Jul. 5, 2022—Jarrod Smith, research associate professor of biochemistry, successfully submitted an S10 proposal to purchase twenty GPU compute nodes, each consisting of four NVIDIA “A6000” GPUs and 64 Intel “Platinum” CPU cores, and has received an award of nearly $600,000. This will be combined with up to $100,000 in matching funds from the VU Basic Sciences...
CSB faculty awarded Seeding Success Grants
Jun. 29, 2022—Vanderbilt University has awarded CSB faculty Martin Egli, professor of biochemistry, and Yi Ren, assistant professor of biochemistry, Seeding Success Grants. The grants support the early stages of pioneering research projects identified as likely candidates for further funding from federal, foundation and industry sponsors. Dr. Egli received his award for his research of “Microcrystal...
Wan named Pew Scholar
Jun. 17, 2022—Will Wan, assistant professor of biochemistry, has been named a 2022 Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences. The Pew Scholars Program in the Biomedical Sciences provides funding to young investigators of outstanding promise in science relevant to the advancement of human health. The funding will allow the Wan lab to use and develop cutting-edge methods...
Zanic named Chancellor Faculty Fellow
Jun. 17, 2022—Marija Zanic, associate professor of cell and developmental biology, is one of thirteen faculty members from across the university to be selected for the 2022 cohort of Chancellor Faculty Fellows. The selected faculty members will meet as a group during the course of their fellowships to exchange ideas on teaching and research, building a broader...
Science for a Green Energy Future
Jun. 17, 2022—My favorite part of being a scientist is the challenge of tackling hard problems. It is a career that encourages creativity and collaboration, and it is one where a large number of failures are to be expected and any small step forward can be a cause for celebration. When reading about the climate crisis, however,...
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