Events: MiniSymposium 2009 Minisymposium on Systems Biology of Redox Stress Download registration
form (PDF). The Redox Biology Center's Seventh Annual Minisymposium was held on Friday, September 18, 2009 in the Sheldon Museum of Art Auditorium. The minisymposium, hosted by Dr. Donald Becker Director of the Nebraska Redox Biology Center, focused on "System Biology of Redox Stress". The minisymposium began with registration and a continental breakfast at 8:30 AM and included a full day of presentations with a luncheon for all attendees. Each speaker presented a 30 minute talk followed by 10 minutes of questions from the audience. The scheduled speakers were Dr. Patsy Babbitt, Professor and Vice Chair of Bioengineering & Biotherapeutic Science with the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at the University of California, San Francisco; Dr. Nitin Baliga, Associate Professor, Institute for Systems Biology; Dr. Joseph Barycki, Associate Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and member of the Redox Biology Center Mentoring Council; Dr. Christopher Cheng, Associate Professor with the Department of Chemistry , University of California, Berkeley and Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Dr. Dmitri Fomenko, Assistant Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln and member of the Redox Biology Center; Dr. Ursula Jakob, Associate Professor, Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, University of Michigan; and Dr. David Salt, Professor, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture, Purdue University. The members of the External Advisory Council include Dr. Ruma Banerjee, Vincent Massey Collegiate Professor of Biological Chemistry at the University of Michigan; Dr. Patsy Babbitt, Head of Bioinfomatics at the University of California, San Francisco; Dr. Perry Frey, Robert H. Abeles Professor of Biochemistry at The University of Wisconsin at Madison; Dr. Vadim Gladyshev, Professor of Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Dr. Greg Petsko, Guyla and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry and Director of the Rosensteil Basic Medical Research Center at Brandies University; and Dr. Irwin Fridovich, James B. Duke Professor, Emeritus at Duke University Medical Center.
Brief Bios of Minisymposium Speakers
|
Patsy Babbitt, Ph.D is Professor and Vice
Chair of Bioengineering & Biotherapeutic
Science with the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at
the California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at the
University of California, San Francisco. Dr. Babbitt
received her bachelor's degree in Biology from Mills College
in 1979 and her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from UCSF
in 1988. She continued her career as a postdoctoral researcher
and assistant research chemist and then joined UCSF in 1993. Her
laboratory works with using superfamily analysis to understand
how protein sequence and structure determine protein function.
Their computational approach begins with identifying the sets
of divergently related proteins that comprise enzyme superfamilies
and then attempts to correlate their conserved and variable
structural features to similarities and differences in their
functions. Her laboratory uses both computational and experimental
methods to improve their understanding of how protein structures
mediate protein function. Here, they develop and use the tools
of bioinformatics and computational structural biology to integrate
the information coming out of the genome projects with available
tertiary structural information. One primary goal of their
computational work is to develop a methodology for "rational
protein design" that can be used in the laboratory to
engineer new functionalities into proteins.
Nitin S. Baliga, PhD is an Associate Professor
with the Institute of Systems Biology in Seattle, WA. He received
his B. Sc. degree in Microbiology from the University of Bombay,
his M. Sc. in Marine Biotechnology from Goa University and
his Ph.D. in Microbiology from the University of Massachusetts
in 2000. He began
his career as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Systems
Biology in 2000 where he remains today. Nitin coordinates
a multidisciplinary group of scientists for the purpose of
constructing systems scale predictive models of biological
responses to stress. Using high throughput technologies
in conjunction with molecular biology, genetics, software engineering
and statistical analysis his laboratory has put together an
approach for deconstructing biological circuits in any microbe
(and some eukaryotes) into predictive models. He is now integrating
microfluidics and high resolution modeling into their approach
to make these models suitable for re-engineering. Nitin
will present some recent findings from applications of this
approach to the study of OSR. He has received numerous grants,
serves as an Editorial Board Member of BMC Systems Biology
and has over 35 publications.
Joseph
J. Barycki, PhD graduated from the
University of Rochester with a Bachelor's degree in Biology
in 1991 and from the University of Delaware with a Ph.D. in
Biochemistry in 1997. He worked as a postdoctoral associate
at the University of Minnesota in Leonard Banaszak's laboratory
in protein crystallography. Dr.
Barycki began his career at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln
in 2002 and is currently an Associate Professor in the Department
of Biochemistry and mentoring council member of the Redox
Biology Center. His research program is focused on
the two major thiol-based redox buffers of the cell, thioredoxin
and glutathione. These two biomolecules are largely responsible
for the tightly controlled maintenance of intracellular reduction-oxidation
status essential for normal cellular function. His lab uses
protein crystallography in combination with site-directed
mutagenesis, enzymology, protein chemistry, and other biophysical
techniques, to examine the biological functions of the enzymes
responsible for maintaining reduced glutathione and thioredoxin
reservoirs.In addition to redox homeostasis, his group
is also involved in several collaborative projects focused
on structure and function relationships in enzymes of biomedical
significance. Most recently, they have been collaborating
with the Simpson lab on enzymes involved in hyaluronan metabolism.
Christopher
J. Chang, PhD is
an Associate Professor with the Department of Chemistry at
the University of California at Berkeley and an Investigator
with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received
his B.S. and M.S. degrees from Caltech in 1997. After spending
a year as a Fulbright scholar in Strasbourg, France, Chris
was an NSF and Merck predoctoral fellow at MIT and received
his Ph.D. in 2002 under the supervision of Prof. Dan Nocera,
where his thesis focused on the application of proton-coupled
electron transfer as a mechanistic platform for developing
catalytic oxygen reduction and evolution reactions. He stayed
at MIT as a Jane Coffins Childs postdoctoral fellow with
Prof. Steve Lippard from 2002 to 2004, working on zinc sensing
for neuroscience applications and then began his independent
career at UC Berkeley in July 2004. He is currently an Associate
Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley and Investigator of
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Chris' research laboratory
currently uses a combination of inorganic chemistry, organic
chemistry, chemical biology, and molecular biology approaches
to study problems in neuroscience, immunology, energy research,
and green chemistry. His honors and awards include a Camille
and Henry Dreyfus New Faculty Award (2004), American Federation
for Aging Resesarch Award (2005), Arnold and Mabel Beckman
Young Investigator (2005), National Science Foundation CAREER
Award (2006), Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering
(2006), Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship (2007), Paul Saltman Award,
Metals in Biology Gordon Research Conference (2008), Amgen
Young Investigator Award (2008), Hellman Faculty Award (2008),
Bau Award in Inorganic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences
(2008), and Technology Review TR35 Young Innovator Award
(2008).
Dmitri
Fomenko, PhD is Assistant Professor
in Department of Biochemistry - University of Nebraska. He
received his M.S. degree in Biotechnology from the Academy
of Fine Chemical Technology (Moscow, Russia) in 1995 and his
Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology from the Institute of Molecular
Genetics (Moscow, Russia) in 1999. Dmitri's laboratory studies
the roles of thiol oxidoreductases in thiol-dependent redox
processes and thiol-mediated signaling in cells. He combines
the use of high throughput computational methods with experimental
approaches in research work by developing and employing various
bioinformatics methods that take advantage of genome sequencing,
proteomics and functional genomics projects, and which are
followed with in vitro and in vivo tests of the in silico predictions.
Dmitri's research focuses on the roles of thiol peroxidases
in hydrogen peroxide mediated signaling, on the thiol-based
redox system in the endoplasmic reticulum, redox control of
protein folding and protein glycosylation and roles thiol-dependant
processes in different physiological and pathophysiological
conditions. One of Dmitri's research directions is related
to in silico identification and experimental characterization
of selenoproteins - the narrow group of oxidoreductases with
selenocysteine in place of redox-active cysteine.
Ursula Jakob PhD is an Associate Professor
with the Department of Molecular and Developmental Biology
at the University of Michigan. Dr. Jakob received her B.S.
degree in 1991 from Regensburg University in Germany, and her
Ph.D. in 1995 also from Regensburg University. From 1996 until
1998 she was a postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University
of Michigan with a fellowship from the German government, and
from 1998 until 2001 she was an Assistant Research scientist
at UM. She has been chosen as a "Biological Scholar" at
the University of Michigan, a prestigious designation awarded
by a University-wide committee. She is also a recipient of
the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award in the Biomedical
Sciences 2000. In addition, she won a Sokol Postdoctoral Award
in 1998. Her research is focused on the biochemical aspects
of the bacterial response to heat shock. They are very interested
in discovering new redox regulated proteins. Therefore, her
lab has developed Redox Proteomics techniques, which allow
them to determine the exact thiol-disulfide state of hundreds
of cellular proteins in a single experiment. Redox-Proteomics
allows us to see the global changes in the thiol-disulfide
status of proteins that happen in the cell when it is exposed
to oxidative stress conditions. In this way we can learn about
the oxidative stress that occurs in aging organisms and how
cells can better cope with it. When we combine redox proteomics
with genetic experiments, we can also use it to find substrate
proteins of oxidoreductases
David
E. Salt, PhD is a Professor in the
Department of Horticulture at Purdue University. His long term
research interest is to understand the function of the genes
and gene networks that regulate the plant ionome (elemental
composition), along with the evolutionary forces that shape
this regulation. To achieve this his laboratory couples high-throughput
elemental profiling, with bioinformatics, genomics and genetics,
biochemistry and physiology in both genetic model species (yeast,
Arabidopsis thaliana and rice) and "wild" plants that hyperaccumulate
various metals (Cd, Ni & Zn), metalloids (As) and non-metals
(Se) in their native habitat including various Thlaspi, Pteris
and Astragalus species. David E Salt has been involved in such
work since his Ph.D (Liverpool University, UK, 1985 - 1988)
working on the mechanisms of copper tolerance in Mimulus gutattus
(yellow monkey flower). He also has a B.Sc in Biochemistry
(University of North Wales, Bangor, UK, 1981 - 1984) and an
M.Sc in Computer Science (Hallam University, UK, 1984 - 1985),
and has held faculty positions at Rutgers University (1993
- 1997), Northern Arizona University (1998 - 2001), and is
currently a Professor at Purdue University, where he has been
since 2001. David E Salt has published over 80 peer reviewed
papers since 1989 with currently approximately 4000 citations.
