Lorena Infante Lara

Researchers from the Warren Center for Neuroscience Drug Discovery, in collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim, developed a compound that can treat both negative and positive symptoms of schizophrenia in rodents. The compound holds promise as an investigational tool and an inspiration for novel schizophrenia therapies. Read More

Alexandra C. Schwartz, a recent Ph.D. graduate from the Chemical and Physical Biology Program, and colleagues developed an experimental and artificial intelligence–coupled methodology to explore the structural dynamics of membrane proteins. Read More

Researchers from the lab of Richard Simerly have uncovered the first example of activity-dependent development of hypothalamic neural circuitry. The work also suggests a novel role for the hunger hormone leptin in specifying the development of neural circuits involved in autonomic regulation and food intake. Read More

The academic landscape can seem like an unmoving entity, but it’s the people within it that make it tick and grow to new frontiers. No outlook on our School of Medicine Basic Sciences is complete without recognizing significant faculty transitions, including well-deserved promotions, exciting new appointments, and bittersweet departures as… Read More

A newly determined structure from the lab of Yi Ren reveals information about the mRNA export pathway and suggests that herpes viruses could hijack that interaction to infect their host. The new structures also reveal how certain mutations in the protein complex could play a role in cancers. Read More

Mirazul Islam, a graduate student in the lab of Professor Ken Lau, has developed a molecular clock that records the timing of cellular events at a single-cell resolution. Read More

Led by Craig W. Lindsley, Vanderbilt drug discovery experts set out to develop a backup drug candidate to improve memory loss in people with Alzheimer’s disease. Read More

Christian de Caestecker, a Ph.D. student in the lab of Ian Macara, Louise B. McGavock Professor and chair of the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, proposed and validated a mechanism that solved a decades-old mystery: he shed light on the process by which epithelial cells, polarized cells that face the outside world, sort and deliver the specialized proteins they need at each cell’s poles. Read More

For researchers, projects can sometimes feel like babies, and there is nothing more satisfying than seeing your baby grow up. For William Tansey, professor of cell and developmental biology, this baby started 10 years ago when he and Stephen Fesik, Orrin H. Ingram II, Professor of Cancer Research and professor of biochemistry, discovered that a protein called WDR5 is a “partner in crime” to MYC, a transcription factor and oncogene that is often mutated in cancers. In fact, dysregulation of MYC is estimated to be responsible for about a third of all cancer deaths annually. Read More

Research from Teru Nakagawa, professor of molecular physiology and biophysics, describes intricacies of normal brain function with implications for our understanding of brain injury and recovery: A decrease in pH can modify a neurotransmitter receptor’s structure, thereby modulating its location and kinetics. Read More