The 37th Summer Symposium in Molecular Biology, presented by the biochemistry and molecular biology department, is calling for undergraduate and graduate students, postdocs, research personnel and faculty to submit abstracts for the upcoming June symposium.
With the help of a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer, associate professor of chemistry Scott Showalter is moving closer to the biomedical breakthrough he so desires: a cure for cancer.
A Penn State-led research team has found that changes to proteins called histones, which are associated with DNA, can control whether or not a gene is allowed to function.
Proceeds from the upcoming Jeremy Herbstritt Memorial 5K Run/Walk will be donated to the families of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings. The event will be held at 6:30 p.m. on April 16 on Curtin Road near the Intramural Building on the University Park campus of Penn State.
Scientists at Penn State and Duke University have identified a gene associated with regeneration of injured nerve cells. The team, led by Melissa Rolls, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State, has found that a mutation in a single gene can entirely shut down the process by which axons -- the parts of the nerve cell that are responsible for sending signals to other cells--regrow themselves after being cut or damaged. We are hopeful that this discovery will open the door to new research related to spinal-cord and other neurological disorders in humans, Rolls said.
Photo of the Day set for December 2012. Penn State's University Park campus.
Anywhere there's a surface and water in the liquid state, Tom Wood confirms, you're going to have biofilms. In riverbeds and showerheads. On the hulls of ships and inside pipelines. On contact lenses and joint prostheses and the gleaming white surfaces of your teeth. Biofilms, says Wood, professor of chemical engineering and biochemistry at Penn State, are communities of bacteria that have the ability to cement themselves to a solid surface, and then—if you picture them in a river, say—rather than going with the flow they anchor down to a rock, and as the river goes by they get the nutrients they need and they're able to thrive.
Eleven new faculty members joined the Penn State College of Engineering for the 2012-13 academic year.
An analysis of newly sequenced polar bear genomes is providing important clues about the species' evolution, suggesting that climate change and genetic exchange with brown bears helped create the polar bear as we know it today. The international study, led by researchers at Penn State and the University at Buffalo, found evidence that the size of the polar bear population fluctuated with key climatic events over the past million years, growing during periods of cooling and shrinking in warmer times.
A team of Penn State scientists has devised a new strategy for reactivating genes that cause cancer tumors to shrink and die, and tested it in mice with promising results. The researchers hope their discovery will one day aid in the development of an anti-cancer drug that effectively and selectively targets cancerous tissue.
Carsten Krebs, a professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and a professor of chemistry at Penn State University, has been chosen by the Society for Biological Inorganic Chemistry (SBIC) as the recipient of the Society's 2012 Early Career Award. The SBIC Early Career Award has been described as the signature award in the field of biological inorganic chemistry. It is awarded to the most meritorious scientist who has completed no more than 15 years of distinguished research in the field. The award comes with a monetary prize and a plaque, and will be presented to Krebs before his plenary lecture at the 16th International Conference for Biological Inorganic Chemistry in Grenoble, France.
A device about the size of a dime can manipulate living materials such as blood cells and entire small organisms using sound waves, according to a team of bioengineers and biochemists from Penn State. The device, called acoustic tweezers, is the first technology capable of touchlessly trapping and manipulating Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a one millimeter-long roundworm that is an important model system for studying diseases and development in humans. Acoustic tweezers are also capable of precisely manipulating cellular-scale objects that are essential to many areas of fundamental biomedical research.
Galaxy -- an open-source, web-based platform for data-intensive biomedical and genetic research -- will be expanded with support from a new U41 research grant from the National Institutes of Health. "The Galaxy system will have an important impact on public health," said Anton Nekrutenko, an associate professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State University and one of Galaxy's designers. "This project will make cutting-edge DNA-sequencing and analysis software, as well as storage capacity for large quantities of scientific data, available to clinical researchers in all parts of the world."
Kenneth H. Nealson, a Wrigley Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Southern California, will present the 2011-12 Stone Memorial Lecture at 4 p.m. on Monday, April 23, in 101 Althouse Laboratory on the Penn State University Park campus. This free public lecture, titled "Extracellular Electron Transfer (EET): Some New Things to Think About," is sponsored by the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.
Registration is open for the sixth annual Jeremy Herbstritt 5K Run/Walk, an event honoring the Penn State engineering alumnus who died at the Virginia Tech shootings in 2007. The 5K Run/Walk will begin at 6:30 p.m. on April 16 at the Intramural Building on Curtin Road on the University Park campus of Penn State.
