GCB News

Eight underclassmen from universities across North Carolina spent their summer at Duke and North Carolina Central University (NCCU) getting their first dose of real lab experience. They presented their research findings in a poster presentation on July 26.

Mother Teresa said, “You can do what I cannot do. I can do what you cannot do. Together we can do great things.” Xiling Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering and Center for Genomic and Computational Biology (GCB) member, has taken this sentiment to heart on his new project, Human Cell Atlas Along the Gut-Brain Axis.

The Beckman Foundation highlighted Lawrence David and his lab in a video. David was selected as a Beckman Young Investigator in 2015 for his work in using natural bacterial interactions to control microbial communities.

The Beckman Young Investigator Program provides research support to the most promising young faculty members in the early stages of their academic careers in the chemical and life sciences, particularly to foster the invention of methods, instruments and materials that will open up new avenues of research in science.

Here are summaries of a selection of the papers published by GCB faculty in June 2019:

REGULATION

To better understand the regulatory mechanisms of genome-wide association study (GWAS) loci affecting adipose tissue, Greg Crawford was part of a team that profiled chromatin accessibility in three frozen human subcutaneous adipose tissue needle biopsies and preadipocytes and adipocytes from the Simpson Golabi-Behmel Syndrome cell strain using an ATAC-seq. Read more

Seelos Therapeutics, Inc. (SEEL), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, announced the exclusive worldwide licensing of a gene therapy program targeting the regulation of the SNCA gene, which encodes alpha-synuclein expression, from Duke University. Seelos plans to study this approach, named SLS-004, initially in Parkinson’s Disease (PD). 

Blame junk food or a lack of exercise. But long before the modern obesity epidemic, evolution made us fat too.

“We’re the fat primates,” said Devi Swain-Lenz, a postdoctoral associate in biology at Duke University.

The fact that humans are chubbier than chimpanzees isn’t news to scientists. But new evidence could help explain how we got that way.

Investigating the effects of glucose on adaptor proteins to treat Giant Axonal Neuropathy and other diseases.

Duke Health has announced three pilot funding opportunities to build infastructure and pilot data in support of an upcoming institutional application to become an Alzheimer's Disease Center. An overview of the three RFPs can be found below.

Xiling Shen, Ph.D., associate professor of biomedical engineering, was awarded a grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) for a project titled Human Cell Atlas Along the Gut-Brain Axis. His project is in partnership with Ken Lau, Ph.D., from Vanderbilt University.

Diet fads that influence consumers to deprive their bodies of certain foods, such as the Atkins low-carb diet program, have been around for decades. While this can be a hit or miss for weight loss, scientists are finding the concept of nutrient deprivation may affect tumor growth. Depriving the tumors of cysteine, a non-essential amino acid that becomes essential only to tumor cells once they have been malignantly transformed, has been shown to shrink tumor cells.