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Exploring Maturation of Pancreatic β-cells The β-cells of the pancreatic Islets of Langerhans play a major role in glucose homeostasis through their production of insulin, and they change in their ability to release insulin in response to glucose during development. Fetal and neonatal β-cells secrete more insulin basally and… Read More

An international team has uncovered the potential to beat obesity at the cellular level, characterizing for the first time a complex, little-understood receptor type that, when activated, shuts off hunger. Jens Meiler, professor of chemistry and pharmacology at Vanderbilt University, said pharmaceutical companies long have attempted to develop a small-molecule… Read More

About half of all melanomas have mutations in the BRAF gene that accelerate tumor cell growth and spread. While most patients benefit from targeted anti-BRAF therapy, resistance to treatment and tumor progression is almost inevitable. Vito Quaranta, MD, and colleagues studied the response of several BRAF-mutated melanoma cell lines to BRAF inhibitors. Reporting March 27 in the Biophysical… Read More

Kathleen Gould, Louise B. McGavock Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology in the School of Medicine, is Vanderbilt’s winner of the 2018 Southeastern Conference Faculty Achievement Award. The awards, now in their seventh year, are an initiative of SECU, the academic arm of the Southeastern Conference, and recognize senior faculty at… Read More

Deerfield Management and Vanderbilt University announced today the launch of Ancora Innovation, LLC (“Ancora”), a Deerfield company that will support Vanderbilt’s innovative life science research and leverage Deerfield’s expertise in accelerating state-of-the-art drug development. Ancora will fund projects with the aim of changing the current paradigm of drug development and establishing novel… Read More

Imaging mass spectrometry (IMS) makes it possible to see the spatial distribution of molecules in a thin tissue section based on their molecular masses. It is a powerful tool for biomarker discovery, but identifying proteins detected by IMS remains a difficult task. Jeffrey Spraggins, PhD, and colleagues in the Mass Spectrometry… Read More

Sulfate-Iron Link to Anemia Sulfation (the addition of a sulfate group to a molecule) is an important biochemical process that aids in the detoxification of xenobiotic compounds and plays a role in the biosynthesis of a variety of molecules. In mammalian cells, sulfation requires PAPS (3´-phosphoadenosine 5´-phosphosulfate), which donates… Read More

Physical exercise alone generally fails to produce meaningful weight loss in obese individuals, and reduced non-exercise activity has been suggested to explain this observation. Daniel Lark, PhD, and colleagues explored how interactions between exercise (voluntary wheel running) and non-exercise activity (“off-wheel” activity) affect energy balance in mice. The researchers reported in… Read More

The Vanderbilt Institute of Chemical Biology (VICB) will hold a Founders’ Celebration mini-symposium on March 28 to acknowledge the contributions of its founders, Lawrence Marnett, PhD, and Ned Porter, PhD, and to celebrate 15-plus years of success as a trans-institutional scientific incubator. The event, which is co-sponsored by the Department… Read More

Reporting last month in the journal Stem Cell Reports, Vanderbilt researchers found that a form of MCL-1 maintains stem cell pluripotency through its role in the inner matrix of mitochondria, the cell’s energy producing “power plants.” When this MCL-1 is depleted by an inhibitor, stem cells differentiate. MCL-1 depletion also changes the shape of mitochondria,… Read More