You are here: Home / labs

Brandeis Innovation Announces 2021 Sprout Program

February 4, 2021 By

Brandeis Innovation logoBrandeis Innovation is pleased to announce the kickoff of its annual Sprout program that supports bench research with grants up to $25,000, funded by the Office of the Provost and Office of Technology Licensing. Teams and individuals working on innovative projects and research within the Division of Science are eligible to apply.

Sprout helps bring scientific research and entrepreneurial ambitions to life by providing seed funding. As an added bonus, recipients will also have the option to choose to participate in our spring cohort of the NSF I-Corps fellowship, which provides training in technology commercialization and a stipend up to $750 for related expenses.

Interested applicants can complete this pre-application form, due on February 19th.

Filed Under: grants, labs Tagged With: ,

Ruth Charney to become AMS President on Feb. 1

January 25, 2021 By

Ruth CharneyRuth Charney, the Berenson Professor of Mathematics, will become the President of the American Mathematical Society on February 1.  The Notices of the American Mathematical Society recently published an interview with Charney. In the interview, Charney was asked about COVID’s impact on her own teaching, AMS’s response to COVID and the impact of the crisis on job prospects for new PhDs and postdocs.

Charney, whose research focus is geometric group theory, discussed how she first became involved with AMS and AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics) at a time when there were very few women in the field. One of Charney’s priorities as AMS president will be to increase diversity and inclusion into the study of mathematics.

Charney finished the interview by discussing the importance of professional societies like AMS to the mathematics community.

 

Filed Under: labs, Mathematics Tagged With: ,

Tijana Ivanovic selected to speak at 2021 Future of Biophysics Burroughs Wellcome Fund Symposium

January 5, 2021 By

Tijana IvanovicTijana Ivanovic, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry, has been selected as one of four young scientists to speak at the 2021 Future of Biophysics Burroughs Wellcome Fund Symposium on February 23, 2021. This symposium is part of the 65th Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society and due to COVID concerns, will be held virtually.

The purpose of this symposium is to highlight the work of young researchers who are currently conducting research at the intersection of the physical and life sciences. Research in the Ivanovic Laboratory uses biophysical methods to uncover fundamental molecular mechanisms of virus translocation across biological membranes.

The other speakers selected for the 2021 Symposium are Elisabeth Fischer-Friedrich, TU Dresden, Germany; Abhishek Singharoy, Arizona State University, USA; and Chen Song, Peking University, China.

Filed Under: awards, Biochemistry, labs Tagged With: , , ,

Turrigiano lab uncovers sources of neuronal heterogeneity

December 18, 2020 By

High activity neurons have greater instrinsic excitability and response to local inputs, but no difference in total input type or amount

Mammalian cortex has long been one of the most widely studied systems in neuroscience, dating back to the pioneering work of Santiago Ramon y Cajal in the late 19th century. The cortex is much larger in primates than other mammals, and is thought to be responsible for the advanced cognitive abilities of humans. Today, models of cortical connections and computations form the basis for some of the most powerful deep learning paradigms. However, despite this success, there is still much that is unknown about how cortex functions. One feature of cortex that has recently been discovered is that neurons that appear to be similar to each other can have very different baseline activity levels: some neurons are 100x more active than their neighbors. We don’t know how neurons that are otherwise highly similar in shape and genetic makeup can maintain such different activity levels, or if the neurons with high and low activity levels have different functions in the brain. These neurons are otherwise so similar to each other that it is difficult to tell them apart without recording their activity directly, and current techniques for recording the activity of many neurons simultaneously in live animals do not allow us to later re-identify them for further study.

In a paper recently published in Neuron, the Turrigiano lab, led by postdoctoral researcher Nick Trojanowski, reported a new approach for permanently labeling high and low activity neurons in live animals, and then determining what makes them different. To do this they used a fluorescent protein called CaMPARI2 that changes from green to red as activity increases, but only when exposed to UV light. By shining UV light into the brain, they caused neurons with high activity to turn red, while neurons with low activity remained green. This procedure allowed them to run a series of tests on high and low activity neurons to identify differences between them. They found that high activity neurons would intrinsically generate more activity than low activity neurons when presented with the same stimulus. These high activity neurons also receive more excitatory input specifically from nearby neurons of the same type. Surprisingly, however, they found that the total amount of excitatory and inhibitory input that high and low activity neurons received from other neurons was not a major factor in determining their activity levels. Together, these results tell us that the differences in activity between neurons are due to intrinsic differences, as well as their pattern of connectivity to their nearby partners. This has deep implications for how the networks that underlie cortical computations are built and maintained.

With these tools in hand, it is now possible to further explore the differences between high and low activity neurons. Do these neurons serve different functions? Are the baseline activity levels specified from birth? How do these activity levels affect the mechanisms of plasticity that are responsible for learning and memory? The recently published results represent just the tip of the iceberg of information that can be learned with this new technique, in the mammalian cortex as well as other brain regions.

Filed Under: labs, Neuroscience Tagged With: , , , ,

Learning from how viruses assemble

December 18, 2020 By
Capsid image from paper

credit: eLife

Michael Hagan, Professor of Physics, is quoted extensively in the Chemical & Engineering News article, Lessons learned from watching viruses assemble. The paper discusses how scientists are studying the ability for viruses to self-assemble. During a viral infection, infected cells manufacture the genetic material and other components of the virus. These components then self-assemble, or build themselves into complex shapes, to form new viruses capable of infecting additional cells.

Many viruses contain their genetic material within a protective shell known as a capsid. Michael Hagan is one of the scientists studying how these capsids are formed by modeling the conditions and chemical properties that allow viruses to build themselves. Once understood, researchers hope this will help in drug design and delivery.

Article: Lessons learned from watching viruses assemble, Laura Howes, Chemical & Engineering News-C&EN,  December 15, 2020.

Filed Under: labs, Physics Tagged With: , , , ,

First Rosbash-Abovich Award Recipients Announced

December 15, 2020 By

Michael Rosbash, the Peter Gruber Endowed Chair in Neuroscience and Professor of Biology and his wife, Nadja Abovich, established the Rosbash-Abovich Award as a way to inspire and acknowledge excellence in research by post-doctoral fellows and graduate students in the Brandeis life sciences. The Rosbash-Abovich award will be awarded annually.

The award honors the most outstanding papers published the previous year that have been authored by a Brandeis postdoctoral fellow and a Brandeis PhD student. In addition to the honor being selected, each winner is presented with a monetary award.

Future winners will present their talks at upcoming Volen Scientific Retreats, but due to COVID restrictions, the 2020 winners will be presenting their talks during the Molecular Genetics Journal Club meetings.

Most outstanding paper by a post-doctoral fellow

Michael O'Donnell

Michael O’Donnell, PhD

The 2020 winner for the most outstanding post-doctoral paper is Michael O’Donnell for the publication titled “A neurotransmitter produced by gut bacteria modulates host sensory behavior“. O’Donnell, is a former postdoc in the Piali Sengupta Lab. Sengupta said

Mike is a remarkable scientist and mentor. He single-handedly and independently established a new research direction in my lab. He also served as an informal mentor to many graduate students and has continued to do so even after he left my lab. I greatly appreciated our long discussions and arguments, and he is very much missed.

Sengupta also noted that O’Donnell was chosen to receive this award

on the basis of the creativity and novelty of his work that was published in Nature. The committee was particularly interested in nominating a researcher who was a driving force behind the work and Mike certainly fulfilled this criteria.

O’Donnell is now an assistant professor at Yale and recently formed the O’Donnell lab. He presented his talk to the Molecular Genetics Journal Club on December 2, 2020. He spoke about his work on neuromodulators produced by different bacteria.

Most outstanding paper by a PhD student

James Haber & Gonen Memisoglu

Professor James Haber & Gonen Memisoglu, PhD

The recipient of the 2020 award for the most outstanding PhD student paper is Gonen Memisoglu for the publication “Mec1 ATR Autophosphorylation and Ddc2 ATRIP Phosphorylation Regulates DNA Damage Checkpoint Signaling.“ She was a PhD student in James Haber’s lab. She received her PhD in 2018 and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago. She will be presenting her talk at the Molecular Genetics Journal Club on February 2, 2021.

When asked about his former PhD student, Haber said

I was delighted to learn that Gonen was the recipient of the Rosbash/Abovich award for the best publication by a graduate student last year; but I had to ask “which paper” because Gonen made two important discoveries last year about the way cells respond to DNA damage. Gonen helped develop a highly efficient way to edit the yeast genome and to create dozens of very precise mutations in the Mec1 gene that is the master regulator of the DNA damage response.  When there is a chromosome break, the Mec1 protein phosphorylates a number of proteins that creates a cascade of signaling to prevent cells from progressing through mitosis until damage is repaired. Gonen discovered that the extinction of the this signal depended on Mec1’s autophosphorylation of one specific target and that changing that specific amino acid to one that could not be phosphorylated was enough to cause cells to remain arrested. She also identified several alterations of the Ddc2 protein that associates with Mec1 that were also critical for its normal activation.

During her time in my lab Gonen was a super hard-working and exceptionally insightful grad student, but also incredibly generous with her time, helping others in the lab

Filed Under: awards, Biology, grad students, labs, postdocs Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Protected by Akismet
Blog with WordPress

Welcome Guest | Login (Brandeis Members Only)