Biochemistry Calendar

• Calendar of Events

Awards & Recognition

• Congratulations to Tom Duncan for being recognized by Dr. Chin for “Exceptional Moments
  in Teaching”.
• Congratulations to Nicole Maurici who won third place for overall best poster ($200 reward) at the
  BioInspired Institute's First Symposium hosted by Syracuse University on October 7, 2022.
• Congratulations to Xin Jie Chen who was named SUNY Distinguished Professor at the Fall Faculty
  Convocation on September 14, 2022
• Wenyi Feng was featured in Upstate Online (9/2/22) for her discovery in the Fragile X
  syndrome. https://www.upstate.edu/news/articles/2022/2022-09-01-feng.php
• Nicholas Brennan from the Chen lab won the best poster award at the 3rd International Conference on Musculoskeletal and Neural Interaction that was held on August 24-26 at Emory University in Georgia
• HJ Sekhon secured an NIH F30 predoctoral MD/PhD fellowship entitled “Molecular Devices for the Detection of Treatment of HCMV Infection”, on his first try. $51,752 directs/year for 5 years. Gary Chan is his co-Sponsor
• Congratulations to Wenyi Feng who was awarded a two-year NIH R21 for her project “Understanding the Genome Maintenance Function of the Fragile X Protein (FMRP). First year directs are $150,000, $448,250 total cost
• Congratulations to Nicole Maurici who was awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) Individual Predoctoral Fellowship to Promote Diversity in Health-Related July-August 2022 Research (Parent F31-Diversity), $43,571/year for 4 years
• Xiang Li won a Young Investigator Travel Award from International Experimental Biology and Medicine conference and was selected for an oral presentation. The meeting was held in Memphis on April 29th- May 1st
• Baylee Porter won the Second Place Young Investigator Poster Award at the International Experimental Biology and Medicine conference.
• Congratulations to Jessica Ridilla who received a President’s Award for Excellence in Teaching!
• Congratulations to Jessica Henty Ridilla who was selected by the graduate student body as the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Teacher Award!
• Congratulations to Kassidy Zimmer who was selected by the graduate student body as the recipient of the Professional and Public Service Award!
• Congratulations to Morgan Pimm who was selected by the graduate student body as the recipient of the Max Mozell Unsung Hero Award!
• Alaji Bah is highlighted in the February 25, 2022 Pew Scholars’ article “What It Means to Be Black in Science: Pew Scholars’ Experiences
  A celebration of leading biomedical scientists of color:
  https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2022/02/25/what-it-means-to-be-black-in-science-pew-scholars-experiences
• A recent publication on genome instability in FXS by Chakroborty et al. from the Feng lab was part of Crouse OB/GYN Grand Rounds presented by Dr. Lebel on February 11, 2022. Dr Lebel selected 20 publications from the three universities in Syracuse and gave each a short synopsis. It serves as a nice entryway for students/faculty who are broadly interested in genetics to a variety of subjects.
• Xin Jie Chen has been chosen as a SUNY Distinguished Professor. His appointment starts soon, and he will be recognized at Convocation in the fall. Congratulations!

Publications

• Ashley J. Canning, Susan Viggiano, Martin E. Fernandez‑Zapico & Michael S. Cosgrove. (2022)  Parallel functional annotation of cancer‑associated missense mutations in histone methyltransferases.  Scientific Reports 12:18487
• Ryan J. Palumbo, Nathan McKean, Erinn Leatherman, Kevin E.W. Namitz, Laurie Connell, Aaron Wolfe, Kelsey Moody, Cene Gostincar, Nina Gunde-Cimerman, Alaji Bah, and Steven D. Hanes. (September 7, 2022) Coevolution of the Ess1-CTD axis in polar fungi suggests a role for phase
  separation in cold tolerance. Science Advances Vol. 8, No. 36
• Senter NC, McCulley A, Kuznetsov VA, Feng W. Genes (Basel). 2022 Jul 11;13(7)  Identification of recurrent chromosome breaks underlying structural rearrangements in mammary cancer cell lines.
• Ryan J. Palumbo, Alana E. Belkevich, Haleigh G. Pascual, Bruce A. Knutson (02 June 2022) A clicially-relevant residue of POLR1D is required for Drosophila development, American Association for Anatomy
• Xinbei Liu, Jessica L. Henty-Ridilla (2022) Multiple roles for the cytoskeleton in ALS. Experimental Neurology, 114143.
• Morgan L Pimm, Xinbei Liu, Farzana Tuli, Jennifer Heritz, Ashley Lojko, Jessica L Henty-Ridilla
  (2022) Visualizing molecules of functional human profilin. eLife, 11:e76485.
• Xinbei Liu, Morgan L. Pimm, Brian Haarer, Andrew T. Brawner, and Jessica L. Henty-Ridilla. “Biochemical characterization of actin assembly mechanisms with ALS-associated profilin variants” European Journal of Cell Biology (2022): Volume 101, Issue 2, April 2022, 151212
• John, A.M., Sekhon, H., Ha, J.-H., Loh, S.N. (2022). Engineering a fluorescent protein color switch using entropy-driven beta strand exchange. ACS Sens. 7, 263.
• Zhao, J., Liu, X., Blayney, A., Zhang, Y., Gandy, Lo. Mirsky, P.O., Smith, N., Zhang, F., Linhardt, R.J., Chen, J., Baines, C., Loh, S.N., Wang, C. (2022). Intrinsically Disordered N-terminal Domain (NTD) of p53 Interacts with Mitochondrial PTP Regulator Cyclophilin D. J. Mol. Biol. 434, 167552.
• Pedicone, C., Fernandes, S., Matera, A., Meyer,
  S.T., Loh, S.N., Ha, J.-H., Bernard, D., Chisholm, J.D., Paolicelli, R.C., Kerr, W.G. (2022). Discovery of a novel SHIP1 agonist that promotes degradation of lipid-laded phagocytic cargo by microglia. iScience, in press.
• Ha, J.-H., Prela, O., Carpizo, D.R.*, Loh, S.N.* (2022). p53 and zinc: a malleable relationship. Front. Mol. Biosci. 9, 895887. *Corresponding authors.
• Sekhon, H., Loh, S.N. (2022). Engineering protein activity into off-the-shelf DNA devices. Cell Reports Meth., in press
• Joshi I, Peng J, Alvino G, Kwan E, Feng W. Exceptional origin activation revealed by comparative analysis in two laboratory yeast strains. PLoS One. 2022;17(2):e0263569. eCollection 2022. PubMed PMID: 35157703; PubMed Central PMCID: PMC8843211.
• Bachant J, Hoffman EA, Caridi C, Nugent CI, Feng W. The yeast Dbf4 Zn2+ finger domain suppresses single-stranded DNA at replication forks initiated from a subset of origins. Curr Genet. 2022 Feb 11;. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 35147742.
• Gasparayan H, Caridi C, Julius J, Feng W, Bachant J, Nugent CI. Yeast Stn1 promotes MCM to circumvent Rad53 control of the S phase checkpoint. Curr Genet. 2022 Feb 12;. [Epub ahead of print] PubMed PMID: 35150303.

Presentations

• Connie Mitra, Farzana Tuli, and Patty Kane attended the ASBMB meeting in Philadelphia from April 2-5, 2022. Connie and Farzana presented posters and Connie gave a talk at their Spotlight session. Connie also received the ASBMB Graduate student/ Postdoctoral researcher Travel award
• Four of Bruce Knutson’s students attended and presented posters at the EB ASBMB meeting in Philly in April.
• Wenyi Feng gave a seminar to the Department of Biological Sciences at SUNY Oswego on February 25th as part of the visiting scholar series sponsored by College of Graduate Studies

Departmental Newsletter

All newsletters are in Adobe Acrobat format.

September-October 2022 Newsletter
July-August 2022 Newsletter
May-June 2022 Newsletter
March-April 2022 Newsletter
January-February 2022 Newsletter