Sprout Award Winners Announced

The recipients of the 6th annual Sprout Awards have been announced. There will be eight teams from labs in the Biology, Biochemistry, and Chemistry departments sharing the $100,000 in funding in FY 2017. The Sprout program’s grant pool was doubled this year in order to expand the support for the promising innovation and research that is happening here at Brandeis University.  The Sprout program, created 6 years with the intent to encourage entrepreneurial activity, is sponsored by the Office of the Provost and the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center. It is administered by the university’s Office of Technology Licensing

(read more at Brandeis Now).

 

SPROUT Continues Growing Support for Brandeisian Innovators

Program Will Bestow Up to $100,000 to Promising Research Proposals

Could your research impact the world or do you have an idea that could create positive change? Need funding? SPROUT can help with that.

The popular SPROUT program, now in its sixth year, has announced increased funding for the 2016 round of proposals. SPROUT is funded by the Office of the Provost and run by Office of Technology Licensing. This year the Hassenfeld Family Innovation Center, recently created to support entrepreneurial and innovative collaborations happening across campus, contributed an additional $50,000 to be disbursed among the most promising requests.

Historically, the program has supported a diverse scope of lab-based innovations from all departments in the sciences  including Biology, Biochemistry, Physics, and Chemistry.  Past candidates have proposed projects ranging  from early‐stage research and development to patent‐ready projects ranging from treatments for diseases to lab tools.  Brandeis lab scientists have pitched their projects, including HIV vaccines (Sebastian Temme, Krauss lab),  neuroslicers (Yasmin Escobedo Lozoya, Nelson lab) and the use of carrot fiber as an anti-diabetic  (Michelle Landstrom, Hayes lab) to a panel of distinguished, outside judges. A SPROUT award can jumpstart your innovation and lead to continued opportunities. SPROUT awardees researching the use of carrot fiber as an anti-diabetic food agent were just awarded additional funding by the Massachusetts Innovation Commercialization Seed Fund program.

Other successful projects include “Enzymatic Reaction Recruits Chiral Nanoparticles to Inhibit Cancer Cells” led by Xuewen Du from the Xu lab, “Semaphorin4D: a disease‐modifying therapy for epilepsy” led by Daniel Acker of the Paradis lab, “X‐ray transparent Microfluidics for Protein Crystallization” led by Achini  Opathalage from the Fraden lab and “New and Rational Catalyst Development for Green Chemistry”  from the Thomas lab.  Those interested in learning more about past SPROUT winners are invited to read this recent Brandeis NOW article. A list of additional winners, along with their executive summaries, is available on the Brandeis OTL website.

Teams seeking support for scientific projects which require bench research, lab space, and/or lab equipment are encouraged to submit an abstract prior to the March 7 deadline. The competition is open to the entire Brandeis community including faculty, staff, and students. The Office of Technology Licensing will conduct information sessions on Thursday, February 25th 11:30 a.m.‐12:30 p.m. in Volen 201 and on Monday, February 29th 1:00 p.m.‐2:00 p.m. at the Shapiro Science Center, 1st Floor Library. Staff will address the application process as well as specific questions and interested applicants are highly encouraged to attend.

More details regarding the SPROUT awards, process and online application may be found at bit.ly/SPROUT16.

More science

We’ve all been busy this spring writing grants and teaching courses and doing research and graduating(!), so lots of publications snuck by that we didn’t comment on. Here’s a few I think that might be interesting to our readers.

• From Chris Miller‘s lab, bacterial antiporters do act as “virtual proton efflux pumps”:
  • Tsai MF, Miller C. Substrate selectivity in arginine-dependent acid resistance in enteric bacteria. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013;110(15):5893-7.
  • Tsai MF, McCarthy P, Miller C. Substrate selectivity in glutamate-dependent acid resistance in enteric bacteria. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013;110(15):5898-902.
• Are ninja stars responsible for controlling actin disassembly? Seems like the Goode lab might think so.
  • Chaudhry F, Breitsprecher D, Little K, Sharov G, Sokolova O, Goode BL. Srv2/cyclase-associated protein forms hexameric shurikens that directly catalyze actin filament severing by cofilin. Mol Biol Cell. 2013;24(1):31-41.
• What do you get from statistical mechanics of self-propelled particles? The Hagan and Baskaran groups team up to find out.
  • Redner GS, Hagan MF, Baskaran A. Structure and dynamics of a phase-separating active colloidal fluid. Phys Rev Lett. 2013;110(5):055701.
• From John Lisman and Ole Jensen (PhD ’98), thoughts about what the theta and gamma rhythms in the brain encode
  • Lisman JE, Jensen O. The theta-gamma neural code. Neuron. 2013;77(6):1002-16.
• From Mike Marr‘s lab, studeies using genome-wide nascent sequencing to understand how transcrption bursting is controlled in eukaryotic cells
  • Pennington KL, Marr SK, Chirn GW, Marr MT, 2nd. Holo-TFIID controls the magnitude of a transcription burst and fine-tuning of transcription. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2013;110(19):7678-83.
• From the Lau and Sengupta labs, RNAi pathways contribute to long term plasticity in worms that have gone through the Dauer stage
  • Hall SE, Chirn GW, Lau NC, Sengupta P. RNAi pathways contribute to developmental history-dependent phenotypic plasticity in C. elegans. RNA. 2013;19(3):306-19.
• Can nanofibers selectively disrupt cancer cell types? Early results from Bing Xu‘s group.
  • Kuang Y, Xu B. Disruption of the Dynamics of Microtubules and Selective Inhibition of Glioblastoma Cells by Nanofibers of Small Hydrophobic Molecules. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl. 2013.

  

Ye Zhang wins Materials Research Society Poster Award

Ye Zhang, a Postdoctoral Fellow from Prof. Bing Xu’s research group at Brandeis, won the 2012 MRS Fall Meeting Poster Awards for her poster titled Self-oscillatory Hydrogels Driven by Belousov-Zhabotinsky Reaction within the symposium on Bioinspired Directional Surfaces-From Nature to Engineered Textured Surfaces & Precision Polymer Materials-Fabricating Functional Assemblies, Surfaces, Interfaces, and Devices. The goal of the project is to make materials that operate like synthetic cardiac or intestinal muscles; feed them and they will pump forever, or as long as the arteries remain open. Ye, the poster’s lead author, is a member of the Brandeis Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) working on project involving the groups of Profs. Bing Xu, Irving Epstein and Seth Fraden of the Chemistry and Physics Departments.

Ye’s work focuses on the development and study of active matter based on non-linear chemical dynamics, specifically the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction. Beginning two years ago she systematically modified a class of gels that exhibit periodic volume oscillations which were produced by other groups. First, Ye succeeded in significantly improving the amplitude of volume oscillations. Next, she developed several novel self-oscillatory systems and established a systematic way to improve the bulk material properties of the synthetic heart.  To build a reliable beating heart, Ye optimized the molecules building the material at the molecular level of tens to hundreds of atoms, or scales of 1 nm and then figured out how to assemble them into networks of polymers on the scales of 10 – 100 nm, and then further assembled them on a longer length scale, into elastic networks on the scales of microns, and finally sculpted the resulting rubbery materials using photolithographic and microfluidic methods into useful shapes for study and application. Ye’s award is a recognition of her contribution to molecular engineering and serves as a quintessential example of the  “bottom-up” construction methods exemplified by the interdisciplinary teams of the Brandeis MRSEC.

NSAID gels and COX-2 selectivity in topical pain killers

Research from Bing Xu’s lab, published in November in Journal of the American Chemical Society, has recently been featured in C&E News. The Xu lab researchers, including Chemistry grad students Jiayang Li, Yi Kuang, Yuan Gao, Xuewen Du and Junfeng Shi, synthesized hydrogels by synthetically coupling small D-amino acid peptides to naproxen (a non-steroidal antiinflammatory drug – NSAID). This was done with the idea of forming gels that can be used for topical pain treatment.

Studies on the compounds formed showed that not only are gels formed, but the D-peptide conjugates of naproxen showed better selectivity towards COX-2 (the therapeutic target) compared to COX-1 (a source of side effects) than naproxen alone or an L-peptide conjugate. Clinical applications are still far away, but this finding opens exciting new avenues for research.

Li J, Kuang Y, Gao Y, Du X, Shi J, Xu B. d-Amino Acids Boost the Selectivity and Confer Supramolecular Hydrogels of a Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug (NSAID). J Am Chem Soc. 2012.

Trimethoprim decorated beads for magnetically manipulating mammalian cells

Brandeis grad students Yue Pan (Chemistry) and Marcus Long (Biochemistry), together with postdoc Hsin-Chieh Lin and Professors Lizbeth Hedstrom and Bing Xu, have extended their previous work on 6 nm diameter magnetic nanobeads (comparable in size to a globular protein). They’ve shown that when decorated with the ligand trimethoprim, the nanobeads can be used to selectively bind to target E coli DHFR fusion proteins, and in addition can be used to manipulate live cells with a magnetic force. This work entitled “Cell Compatible Trimethoprim (TMP)-Decorated Iron Oxide Nanoparticles Bind Dihydrofolate Reductase (DHFR) for Magnetically Modulating Focal Adhesion of Mammalian Cells” is now online in the Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS).

These small, magnetic beads are the first example of solid supported trimethoprim and have numerous advantages over larger traditional beads, including rapid purification, and ultra low non-specific binding. It is, however, their ability to affect live cells that is most important. In the paper they first show that Cos-1 and HeLa cells can be incubated with the beads for over 5 days with little cell death. These cells can subsequently be manipulated by transfection. Finally when exposed to a magnetic force, the focal adhesion of bead-treated Cos-1 cells can be manipulated.

See also: recommendation at Faculty of 1000

Separating proteins and manipulating live cells using magnetic nanoparticles

Brandeis grad students Yue Pan (Chemistry) and Marcus Long (Biochemistry), together with Professors Lizbeth Hedstrom and Bing Xu, have synthesized novel 6 nm diameter magnetic nanobeads (comparable in size to a globular protein) and used them to separate specific proteins from a cell lysate and manipulate live cells. This work has just appeared online in the journal Chemical Science.

Selectively binding glutathione-S-transferase fusion proteins using
glutathione-decorated iron oxide nanoparticles and down-stream applications

These small, magnetic beads have numerous advantages over larger traditional glutathione-modified beads, including rapid purification, and ultra low non-specific binding. Importantly, both the purified GST and the protein of interest (POI) preserve their innate properties. They also demonstrate that functionalized iron oxide nanoparticles can be used to manipulate live cells. This work  establishes design principles for decorating magnetic nanoparticles that will ultimately should lead to a general and comprehensive platform for studying biological interactions and biological systems using a magnetic force.

Nanomaterials in cells

From Bing Xu, one of the new faculty members in the Chemistry Department here at Brandeis, comes a new review on Applications of nanomaterials inside cells. Quantum dots, magnetic nanoparticles, nanowires, the works.