Brandeis Life Sciences

Brandeis is proud of its tradition of undergraduates working in science labs,  alongside grad students, staff and postdocs. This work often leads to publications in the primary scientific literature (see list of undergraduate publications).
The most recent of these, by Nicholas Hornstein and collaborators in the Griffith lab, appears in the Journal of Visualized Experiments. This [...]

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No, this isn’t a Russian short story.
Lead authors postdoc alum Sebastian Kadener and Mol Cell Biol graduate student Joe Rodriguez and their coworkers used tiling arrays to look for targets of the enzyme Drosha in a “Genome-wide identification of targets of the drosha–pasha/DGCR8 complex”, a paper recently published in the journal RNA. Drosha is a [...]

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In a new paper in Journal of General Physiology, Brandeis postdoc Hyun-Ho Lim and Professor Christopher Miller examine the detailed mechanism by which a chloride transporter protein works. In particular, this protein does a rather crazy thing: it stoichiometrically swaps a proton on one side of the membrane for two Cl- ions on the other, [...]

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A broken chromosome (a double-strand DNA break) activates the DNA damage checkpoint to prevent cells from carrying out mitosis until the break has been repaired.  Repair of the break involves the modification and the removal of histone protein octamers from DNA around the break and these must be reestablished when repair is complete.  In a [...]

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Neuroscience Ph.D. candidate Melanie Gainey received an NRSA Fellowship from NINDS. Working in the Turrigiano lab, Melanie plans to study the role of the AMPA receptor subunit GluR2 in synaptic scaling in cultural neurons and in vivo using a conditional GluR2 knockout mouse.
Assistant Professor Suzanne Paradis received a Smith Family New Investigator Award from the [...]

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What happens when you take an ion channel and remove all the parts that conduct ions? The answer might be surprising.
The Drosophila ether-à-go-go gene codes for a potassium channel involved in olfaction, learning, and locomotion. It is not solely a potassium channel, however. In a recent paper in Mol. Cell. Neurosci., Brandeis postdoc alum Xiu [...]

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In a new study appearing in PNAS this week, Brandeis Molecular and Cell Biology graduate student Houra Merrikh and co-workers from the Lovett lab identified the E.coli gene iraD as a regulator of the response to oxidative DNA damage in exponentially growing bacteria. Interestingly, the mechanism seems to involve the alternative RNA polymerase sigma factor [...]

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An article in Cell by recent Molecular and Cell Biology Ph.D. graduate Susan Tran and coworkers demonstrates the power of single particle microscopy in combination with Drosophila genetics in studying molecular motors. Studying lipid droplet movement in embryos, they show that multiple motors are attached to droplets in vivo. Surprisingly, having multiple motors per droplet [...]

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A recent paper in Neuroimage by Brandeis Neuroscience Ph. D. program alumnus Yigal Agam, Professor Robert Sekuler and coworkers attempts to answer the question. To identify the earliest neural signs of recognition memory, they used event related potentials collected from human observers engaged in a visual short term memory task.  Their results point to an [...]

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Single particle electron microscopy reconstruction can be a powerful tool for determining the structure of large protein complexes. One limitation of the technique is the difficulty in coming up with specific labels for the protein that can be visualized with EM. In a new paper in RNA, postdoc Beth Stroupe and coworkers show that the [...]

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