· PDF filetranscript news for the cellular and molecular biology graduate program alumni, faculty, students and more! summer 2015 the cmb

TRANSCRIPT

NEWS FOR THE CELLULAR AND MOLECULAR BIOLOGY GRADUATE

PROGRAM ALUMNI, FACULTY, STUDENTS AND MORE!

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Summer 2015

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THE CMB TRANSCRIPT IS PUBLISHED BY THE CELLULAR & MOLECULAR

BIOLOGY (CMB) GRADUATE PROGRAM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF

WISCONSIN MADISON

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What’s In This

ISSUE?3 Message from the Chair

Introduction by David Wassarman

4 Mock interview EventNasim Jamali showcases a new

professional development opportunity

6 Lab profile- in the news A look into the collaborative research of Shigeki Miyamoto’s and David Bee-be’s Labs

8 CMB photosGrads caught hard at work

10 Student Profile - A Day in the life Joseph Bruckner takes us into the dailyroutine of two CMB graduate students

13 Student PublicationsPublications from the past year

17 Awards & Honors Congratulations to our CMB students and faculty for their achievements

18 Exceptional Thesis awards Adityarup Chakravorty highlights Rob Ihry and Saheed Imam - this year’s recip-ients of the Exceptional Thesis Award

20 support from donorsA big thank you to all CMB donors!

21 Alumni updates We need your help to keep our alumni database updated

22 Fun campus news This year UW-Madison broke the re-cord for world’s largest Rice Krispie Treat, CMB was there to investigate

23 COORDINATING COMMITTEEProgram Leadership

24 program administration Thank you from the CMB Program

Message from theCHAIRDavid Wassarman

Greetings, CMB alumni, stu-dents, and faculty. Thank you for taking the time to catch up on the past year’s happenings in the CMB Program. The transcript highlights the research of CMB students and faculty as well as activities aimed at enriching student training. Current CMB students have written three of the articles. Rup Chakravorty has written about the work of Robert Ihry and Saheed Imam, who were the first recipients of the CMB Exception-al Thesis Award. This annual award honors CMB students who have written and defended exceptional theses. Robert and Saheed each re-ceived $250 as well as a plaque, and their names were added to a plaque that hangs in the Bock Penthouse. Joseph Bruckner chronicles a day in the life of CMB students. This ar-ticle is accompanied by a group of photos. Lastly, Nasim Jamali de-scribes the mock interview work-shop that was organized by the stu-dent-run Professional Development Committee. Workshops organized by the Professional Development Committee are at the center of CMB’s efforts to provide students with the information and tools they need to identify and realize their career goals. We encourage CMB alumni to become involved in these efforts.

Please contact the CMB office, ([email protected])

if you would be willing to dis-cuss your career path with cur-rent CMB students. In closing, I hope that you enjoy reading about the amazing accomplish-ments of CMB students and faculty.


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I believe the CMB and Graduate School’s professional development events are great ways to get exposed to the future opportunities, and the mock interview is the best finish to practicing what we have learned in these events in a professional setting.

Current students, if you are interested in planning for the next Mock Interview Event, please contact Jessica Skarlupka at [email protected].

Here are some useful links that I hope it could help you through your preparation:

Resume Resource: http://www.resume-resource.com/

Distinctive Documents: http://www.distinctiveweb.com/example-projects/sample-resumes/

Blue Sky Resumes: http://www.blueskyresumes.com/

And don’t forget to check here for the upcoming professional development events:

http://cmbprodev.blogspot.com/http://grad.wisc.edu/pd/

Cheers! - Nasim Jamali

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PLANT BIOLOGY

INTERVIEW!! It’s scary, isn’t it? During our training we don’t have enough opportunities to prepare ourselves for post-gradua-tion, especially if we want to consider our options outside of academia.

We’ve always been told to prepare for the day to come! But HOW?!

This was my question and I started looking for an opportunity to prepare myself and practice for it, but I couldn’t find much help for graduate level students on our campus. I started to look more carefully for opportunities to practice and was hoping one day I could practice in a pro-fessional setting before entering the actual interview.I came across the community of practice group at the graduate school and I met Sharon Dubois, a recently graduated student in the Neuroscience Training Program (NTP). I shared my concerns with her and she was also feeling the need to prepare for this important phase in our lives. So we started pursuing this dream of ours slowly until I had a meeting with Jessica Skarlupka and we discussed the idea of adding an event at the end of CMB’s professional de-velopment series and make it a complete series of events by finishing with a Mock Interview opportunity for students to practice. The goal of this series is to prepare students for opportu-nities after graduation and to prepare them for an interview. At the end we would hold a mock interview session for them to practice the skills they learned.

Sharon and I with great help and support from Jessica Skarlupka and Mallory Musolf, our CMB and NTP program coordinators, started planning for this event.

After asking the CMB and NTP students about their interest in a survey, Sharon and I started reaching out to the interviewers of different fields outside of academia from government, bio-tech companies, intellectual property and start-ups.As we reached out to people and invited them as our interviewers, we realized there are even more opportunities out there!

All of our efforts led to two very successful and well-attended Mock Interview events on April 23rd and May 7th, 2015. It was a great learning and leadership experience for me. It was hard, but I enjoyed every sec-ond of it. I experienced the great feeling of following my idea and making it happen!

Mock Interview Eventby: Nasim Jamali, CMB Graduate Student


Mock Interview Event...

LAB PROFILE -‐ IN THE NEWSBy: Alexis Brodt

In a highly successful, first-of-its-kind endeavor, a multidisciplinary team of University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has created a "tumor in a dish:" an ex vivo microenviron-ment that can accurately anticipate a multiple myeloma patient's response to a drug.

The advance could mean a giant step forward in efforts to tailor medical treatment plans to individual patients.

Led by Shigeki Miyamoto, a professor of oncology at UW-Madison, and David Beebe, the John D. MacArthur Professor and Claude Bernard professor of biomedical engineering at UW-Madison, the researchers published news of the advance May 1, 2015, in the Royal So-ciety of Chemistry journal Integrative Biology.

"We're taking the first steps toward mimicking the body in a dish," Beebe says.

Much of the research was led by Chorom Pak, who previously was a graduate student work-ing in Miyamoto's lab.

Pak and Edmond Young (now at the University of Toronto) and the other researchers pro-duced an assay, or testing process, which involves co-culturing multiple myeloma tumor cells with their surrounding nontumor cells, all from the same patient, in a microscale petri dish. The researchers then treated the tumor cells with bortezomib, a drug commonly used in multiple myeloma therapy. And after only three days, the researchers could determine whether the drug was effective — or not.

They compared the results of their ex vivo tests with the success or failure rates of actual patients who had received the drug — and an unprecedented 100 percent of the ex vivo test results matched the results of the patients.

Multiple myeloma is a universally fatal cancer. Rising in the blood marrow due to an accu-mulation of abnormal, or cancerous, plasma cells, myeloma is treatable but incurable.

"The median survival rate has improved, but is only about five to seven years," Pak says.

The new assay could save many multiple myeloma cancer patients the psychological stress of having to try multiple drugs until they find the most effective one. The assay reduces cli-nicians' need for this trial-and-error approach while treating a patient, and it also lowers the cost of treatment.

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LAB PROFILE ‐ IN THE NEWS

The fundamental idea behind the research was to focus on everything surrounding a tumor, not just the tumor itself. These surroundings can include bone marrow stromal cells, macro-phages and other immune cells, all of which represent an integral part of the tumor's envi-ronment. By including these components in a microfluidic petri dish — a device developed by Beebe and Miyamoto's lab a few years ago — the researchers' ability to accurately gauge results increased dramatically.

Beebe says scaling down the testing environment in the group's research is akin to moving from a lake to a bathtub: While the huge area of a standard-sized petri dish dilutes all the ex-tra cells, the microscale petri dish the team used allows cancer cells to continue interacting with their usual surroundings, but outside of the body.

The researchers essentially created a miniaturized external model of an individual's cancer, says Pak.

She has founded a service-based company called Lynx Biosciences based on these findings, and the company was recently a finalist in the 2015 Wisconsin Governor's Business Plan Contest. Pak and fellow researchers are looking to conduct a prospective trial, which, instead of simply matching the results of patients with that of the ex vivo tests, will actually use the ex vivo tests to identify responsive and nonresponsive patients. In addition, they are starting to consider what this discovery means for other cancer types and other drugs.

The researchers' results could have interesting and wide-ranging implications for the future of cancer treatment and therapy, although their work is far from over.

"This is only one type of cancer, one particular drug, and we're a long way from implement-ing this and helping patients in a widespread way," Beebe says. "But it's happening. This is an exciting time in this area, and we're definitely going to see more of this."

Funding for the research came from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health and a collaborative grant funded by the Trillium Fund of the UW Carbone Can-cer Center. Other authors on the paper include hematology Associate Professor Natalie S. Callander and Assistant Professor Fotis Asimakopoulos, biomedical engineering alumnus Edmond W.K. Young, medical physics alumnus Benjamin Titz, biostatistics and medical informatics Professor KyungMann Kim, associate researcher Sandeep Saha, and undergrad-uate student Kenny Chng.

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CMB Photo Album

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A Look Into CMB!

Photos Courtesy of Jessica Ciomperlik

KELLY PITTMAN

TONY DAWSON

ADAM BAYLESS DREW DOERING

Photos by: Jessica Ciomperlik, CMB Graduate Student

MONICA RAO

Esteban Carrillo


ESTEBAN CARRILLO

MONICA RAO

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Nadia Khan >

Amber Lasek >

< Bryan Sibert

CMB Photo AlbumPhotos by: Jessica Ciomperlik, CMB Graduate Student

Check out What'sGoing on at CMB!

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Gulpreet takes time to bike, run, and cook - especially Indian and Indochinese dishes.

Also in his second year, Kevin Cope first dis-covered a love of plant biology growing up on a five-acre farm in Salem, Utah. After completing his undergraduate degree in Plant Science and Biology at Utah State University, Kevin joined the lab of Jean-Michel Ané for his PhD study-ing the mutualistic relationship between poplar trees and the fungi that colonize their roots.

Beyond his family Kevin ispassionately involved in volunteering with a local Boy Scout troop, where he serves as Scoutmaster

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CMB Student Profile:

by: Joseph Bruckner, CMB Graduate Student

A Day in the Life of CMB StudentsOne of the great things about a PhD education and career in science is that so often we apply ourselves in diverse and consistently plastic ways - in a single day a PhD student might be re-quired to perform wet lab experiments, write, critique published literature, present their work, and teach or mentor younger students. Furthermore, one of the strengths of the CMB gradu-ate program is the diversity of research that happens under its umbrella. To capture a general picture of what daily life is like for CMB students, I sat down with two current students and discussed their daily routines in the lab and beyond.

Gulpreet Kaur is a second year student from New Delhi, India. After completing her under-graduate education at Guru Nanak Dev University in Punjab, Gulpreet moved to Florida and completed a masters degree in Cell and Molecular Biology at the Florida Institute of Technol-ogy, where she studied bacterial replication. For her PhD, Gulpreet decided to work in eu-karyotic cells and joined the lab of David Wassarman, where she uses Drosophila fruit flies to study the genetic basis of the neurodegenerative disorder Ataxia telangiectasia.

CMB Student Profile:A Day in the Life of CMB Students


Gulpreet and Kevin begin their days in a similar manner with either a short walk or bike ride to campus. Even the cold Wisconsin winters don’t deter Kevin from his daily bike commute - stud-ded bike tires make the journey possible on all but the most extreme days. After arriving, the day begins with a mixture of reading, writing, and planning the day’s experiments. Prelim preparations are best accomplished with a fresh morning mind, so Gulpreet devotes the bulk of the morning catching up on recent literature relating to her project and topics of interest. Ataxia telangiectasia (A-T for short) is a rare inherited disorder characterized by severe immunodeficiency and pro-gressive neurodegeneration, so Gulpreet searches the literature for background information to inform her hypotheses on the role of DNA damage, oxidative stress, infection, tissue damage, and the associated immune response in A-T pathology.

On a typical day, Kevin might devote half an hour in the morning to meeting and setting out goals with the four undergraduates he supervises, as well as his own experimental planning for the day. His prelim also looming, Kevin spends the rest of the morning reading relevant research and drafting sections of his prelim proposal. Poplar is still an emerging model organism and Kevin is the only one working with it in the Ané lab, so he and his undergraduate team invest significant effort in developing the methods for culturing Poplar in a lab environment and testing their interaction with fungi.

To test his hypotheses about the factors that may mediate the association of fungi with poplar roots, Kevin employs transient gene knockdown and is considering developing CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer his desired changes in the poplar genome.

CMB Student Profile:

In the afternoon at the Wassarman lab in the Genetics and Biotechnology Center, Gulpreet exam-ines the role of an activated immune response in A-T-associated neurodegeneration by extracting and culturing hemolymph from adult flies to assess bacterial load. Gulpreet has observed an ac-tivated immune response in glia in her fly A-T model. Glial cell types are tightly associated with neurons to provide functional, structural, and nutritional support and often implicated in neu-rodegeneration, so in what way might bacterial load affect glia in the brain? Gulpreet and her lab hypothesize that A-T may involve increased intestinal permeability, so to address this hypothesis Gulpreet prepares and feeds her flies special food laced with blue dye. After several hours she sim-ply counts the number of flies whose entire bodies have become blue, or “Smurfed.” A given after-noon might allow for a lot of Drosophila genetics, some hemolymph extraction, a Smurfing assay, and on a particularly busy day even an experiment or two assessing fly behavior.

A few blocks away at the Ané lab in Microbial Sciences, Kevin starts his afternoon with an RNA sequencing experiment to determine the fungal factors that affect plant root growth. A single rep-licate for RNA sequencing might take a full week, so on a given day Kevin might be rooting poplar cuttings, treating them with fungal signals, or freezing and grinding roots for RNA extraction. To validate his results from RNA sequencing and verify genes differentially regulated in plant-fungal symbiosis, Kevin also sets up quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR reactions. To optimize his workflow and assess many candidates, Kevin spends significant time training his undergraduate team for each assay.

Kevin and Gulpreet both finish their lab work at similar times in the early evening. Gulpreet takes time to bike, run, and cook - especially Indian and Indochinese dishes. Since moving to Madison Gulpreet has devoted much of her free time to the Indian Graduate Students Association, where she was vice president last year. Through this group she has hosted international students and organized large cultural events open to the entire campus, especially the Diwali festival each fall.To “help keep him grounded,” Kevin enjoys spending much of his free time around the house with his wife and one-year-old son. Beyond his family Kevin is passionately involved in volunteering with a local Boy Scout troop, where he serves as Scoutmaster. Naturally, plant sciences are colo-nizing Kevin’s home life and extracurricular activities - he organized a plant sciences merit badge for scouts from troops around southern Wisconsin, which included a germination experiment and discussion about careers in plant science, and he also dreams of adding a poplar bonsai to his home.

For more information on the Wassarman and Ané labs, see their faculty trainer profiles at www.cmb.wisc.edu

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Student PublicationsStudent Publications

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Barcus CE, Holt EC, Keely PJ, Eliceiri KW, Schuler LA. (2015). Dense collagen-I matrices enhance pro-tumorigenic estrogen-prolactin crosstalk in MCF-7 and T47D breast cancer cells. PLoS ONE 10, e0116891.

Bruckner JJ, Zhan H, O’Connor-Giles KM. (2015). Advances in imaging ultrastructure yield new insights into presynaptic biology. Front Cell Neurosci (In press).

Calvey CH, Willis LB, Jeffries TW. (2014). An optimized transformation protocol for Lipomyces starkeyi. Curr Gen-et 60, 223-230.

Curran CS, Carrillo ER, Ponik SM, Keely PJ. (2015). Collagen density regulates xenobiotic and hypoxic response of mammary epithelial cells. Environ Toxicol Pharmacol 39, 114-24.

Overmyer KA, Evans CR, Qi NR, Minogue CE, Carson JJ, Chermside-Scabbo CJ, Koch LG, Britton SL, Pagliarini DJ, Coon JJ, Burant CF. (2015). Maximal oxidative capacity during exercise is associated with skeletal muscle fuel selection and dynamic changes in mitochondrial protein acetylation. Cell Metab 21, 468-78.

Fakhraldeen SA, Clark RJ, Roopra A, Chin EN, Huang W, Castorino J, Wisinski KB, Kim T, Spiegelman VS, Alexan-der CM. (2015). Two isoforms of the RNA binding protein, coding region determinant-binding protein (CRD-BP/IGF2BP1), are expressed in breast epithelium and support clonogenic growth of breast tumor cells. J Biol Chem 290, 13386-400.

Choi S, Thapa N, Tan X, Hedman AC, Anderson RA. (2015). PIP kinases define PI4,5P(2) signaling specificity by association with effectors. Biochim Biophys Acta 1851, 711-23.

Thapa N, Choi S, Tan X, Wise T, Anderson RA. (2015). Phosphatidylinositol phosphate 5-kinase Iγ and phospho-inositide 3-kinase/Akt signaling couple to promote oncogenic growth. J Biol Chem 290, 18843-54.

Bacot-Davis VR, Ciomperlik JJ, Basta HA, Cornilescu CC, Palmenberg AC. (2014). Solution structures of Mengo-virus Leader protein, its phosphorylated derivatives, and in complex with nuclear transport regulatory protein, RanGTPase. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 111, 15792-7.

Garcia K, Delaux PM, Cope KR, Ané JM. (2015). Molecular signals required for the establishment and mainte-nance of ectomycorrhizal symbioses. New Phytol (In press).

Mondal A, Potts GK, Dawson AR, Coon JJ, Mehle A. (2015). Phosphorylation at the homotypic interface regu-lates nucleoprotein oligomerization and assembly of the influenza virus replication machinery. PLoS Pathog 11, e1004826.

Denu RA, Rush PS, Ahrens SE, Westergaard RP. (2014). Idiopathic CD4 lymphocytopenia with giant cell arteritis and pulmonary mucormycosis. Med Mycol Case Rep 6, 73-5.

Alexander WG, Doering DT, Hittinger CT. (2014). High-efficiency genome editing and allele replacement in pro-totrophic and wild strains of Saccharomyces. Genetics 198, 859-66.

CMB Student Profile:A Day in the Life of CMB Students


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Erwin GS, Bhimsaria D, Eguchi A, Ansari AZ. (2014). Mapping polyamide-DNA interactions in human cells reveals a new design strategy for effective targeting of genomic sites. Angew Chem Int Ed Engl 53, 10124-8.

Eguchi A, Lee GO, Wan F, Erwin GS, Ansari AZ. (2014). Controlling gene networks and cell fate with precision-tar-geted DNA-binding proteins and small-molecule-based genome readers. Biochem J 462, 397-413.

Chasman D, Ho YH, Berry DB, Nemec CM, MacGilvray ME, Hose J, Merrill AE, Lee MV, Will JL, Coon JJ, Ansari AZ, Craven M, Gasch AP. (2014). Pathway connectivity and signaling coordination in the yeast stress-activated signal-ing network. Mol Syst Biol (In press).

Ho YH, Gasch AP. (2015). Exploiting the yeast stress-activated signaling network to inform on stress biology and disease signaling. Curr Genet (In press).

Hooper C, Jackson SS, Coughlin EE, Coon JJ, Miyamoto S. (2014). Covalent modification of the NF-κB essential modulator (NEMO) by a chemical compound can regulate its ubiquitin binding properties in vitro. J Biol Chem 289, 33161-74.

Helzer KT, Hooper C, Miyamoto S, Alarid ET. (2015). Ubiquitylation of nuclear receptors: new linkages and thera-peutic implications. J Mol Endocrinol 54, 151-67.

Jackson SS, Oberley C, Hooper CP, Grindle K, Wuerzberger-Davis S, Wolff J, McCool K, Rui L, Miyamoto S. (2015). Withaferin A disrupts ubiquitin-based NEMO reorganization induced by canonical NF-κB signaling. Exp Cell Res 331, 58-72.

Goodman CA, Dietz JM, Jacobs BL, McNally RM, You JS, Hornberger TA. (2015). Yes-Associated Protein is up-reg-ulated by mechanical overload and is sufficient to induce skeletal muscle hypertrophy. FEBS Lett 589, 1491-7.

Ma SD, Xu X, Plowshay J, Ranheim EA, Burlingham WJ, Jensen JL, Asimakopoulos F, Tang W, Gulley ML, Cesarman E, Gumperz JE, Kenney SC. (2015). LMP1-deficient Epstein-Barr virus mutant requires T cells for lymphomagenesis. J Clin Invest 125, 304-15.

Jensen JL, Rakhmilevich A, Heninger E, Broman AT, Hope C, Phan F, Miyamoto S, Maroulakou I, Callander N, He-matti P, Chesi M, Bergsagel PL, Sondel P, Asimakopoulos F. (2015). Tumoricidal effects of macrophage-activating immunotherapy in a murine model of relapsed/refractory multiple myeloma. Cancer Immunol Res (In press).

Kaschner LA, Sharma R, Shrestha OK, Meyer AE, Craig EA. (2015). A conserved domain important for association of eukaryotic J-protein co-chaperones Jjj1 and Zuo1 with the ribosome. Biochim Biophys Acta 1853, 1035-45.

Katzenberger RJ, Chtarbanova S, Rimkus SA, Fischer JA, Kaur G, Seppala JM, Swanson LC, Zajac JE, Ganetzky B, Wassarman DA. (2015). Death following traumatic brain injury in Drosophila is associated with intestinal barrier dysfunction. Elife 2015, 10.7554.

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Student Publications

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Song J, Keppler BD, Wise RR, Bent AF. (2015). PARP2 is the predominant Poly(ADP-Ribose) polymerase in Arabi-dopsis DNA damage and immune responses. PLoS Genet 11, e1005200.

Uenishi G, Theisen D, Lee JH, Kumar A, Raymond M, Vodyanik M, Swanson S, Stewart R, Thomson J, Slukvin I. (2014). Tenascin C promotes hematoendothelial development and T lymphoid commitment from human plurip-otent stem cells in chemically defined conditions. Stem Cell Reports 3, 1073-84.

Choi HJ, Loveless T, Lynch AM, Bang I, Hardin J, Weis WI. (2015). A conserved phosphorylation switch controls the interaction between cadherin and β-catenin in vitro and in vivo. Dev Cell 33, 82-93.

Ma S, Huang Z. (2015). Neural Regulation of CNS Angiogenesis During Development. Front Biol (Beijing) 10, 61-73.

Liu K, Myers AR, Pisithkul T, Claas KR, Satyshur KA, Amador-Noguez D, Keck JL, Wang JD. (2015). Molecular mechanism and evolution of guanylate kinase regulation by (p)ppGpp. Mol Cell 57, 735-49.

Park AC, Phillips CL, Pfeiffer FM, Roenneburg DA, Kernien JF, Adams SM, Davidson JM, Birk DE, Greenspan DS. (2015). Homozygosity and heterozygosity for null Col5a2 alleles produce embryonic lethality and a novel classic Ehlers-Danlos syndrome-related phenotype. Am J Pathol 185, 2000-11.

Pisithkul T, Jacobson TB, O'Brien TJ, Stevenson DM, Amador-Noguez D. (2015). Phenolic amides are potent in-hibitors of de novo nucleotide biosynthesis. Appl Environ Microbiol (In press).

Pisithkul T, Patel NM, Amador-Noguez D. (2015). Post-translational modifications as key regulators of bacterial metabolic fluxes. Curr Opin Microbiol 24, 29-37.

Kwan G, Pisithkul T, Amador-Noguez D, Barak J. (2015). De novo amino acid biosynthesis contributes to salmo-nella enterica growth in Alfalfa seedling exudates. Appl Environ Microbiol 81, 861-73.

Pittman KJ, Aliota MT, Knoll LJ. (2014). Dual transcriptional profiling of mice and Toxoplasma gondii during acute and chronic infection. BMC Genomics (In press)Zhang RR, Pointer KB, Kuo JS, Dempsey RJ. (2014). Mutational analysis reveals the origin and therapy-driven evolution of recurrent glioma. Neurosurgery 75, N9-10.

Lyon W, Mehta TI, Pointer KB, Walden D, Elmayan A, Swanson KI, Kuo JS. (2014). Clinton Woolsey: functional brain mapping pioneer. J Neurosurg 121, 983-8.

Schuh AL, Hanna M, Quinney K, Wang L, Sarkeshik A, Yates JR 3rd, Audhya A. (2014). The VPS-20 subunit of the endosomal sorting complex ESCRT-III exhibits an open conformation in the absence of upstream activation. Bio-chem J 466, 625-37.


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Shen QT, Schuh AL, Zheng Y, Quinney K, Wang L, Hanna M, Mitchell JC, Otegui MS, Ahlquist P, Cui Q, Audhya A. (2014). Structural analysis and modeling reveals new mechanisms governing ESCRT-III spiral filament assembly. J Cell Biol 206, 763-77.

Minogue CE, Hebert AS, Rensvold JW, Westphall MS, Pagliarini DJ, Coon JJ. (2015). Multiplexed quantification for data-independent acquisition. Anal Chem 87, 2570-5.

Reusch JA, Nawandar DM, Wright KL, Kenney SC, Mertz JE. (2015). Cellular differentiation regulator BLIMP1 induces Epstein-Barr virus lytic reactivation in epithelial and B cells by activating transcription from both the R and Z promoters. J Virol 89, 1731-43.

Goswami S, Tarapore RS, Poenitzsch Strong AM, TeSlaa JJ, Grinblat Y, Setaluri V, Spiegelman VS. (2015). MicroR-NA-340-mediated degradation of microphthalmia-associated transcription factor (MITF) mRNA is inhibited by coding region determinant-binding protein (CRD-BP). J Biol Chem 290, 384-95.

Traeger LL, Volkening JD, Moffett H, Gallant JR, Chen PH, Novina CD, Phillips GN Jr, Anand R, Wells GB, Pinch M, Güth R, Unguez GA, Albert JS, Zakon H, Sussman MR, Samanta MP. (2015). Unique patterns of transcript and miRNA expression in the South American strong voltage electric eel (Electrophorus electricus). BMC Genomics (In press).

Piechura JR, Tseng TL, Hsu HF, Byrne RT, Windgassen TA, Chitteni-Pattu S, Battista JR, Li HW, Cox MM. (2015). Biochemical characterization of RecA variants that contribute to extreme resistance to ionizing radiation. DNA Repair (Amst) 26, 30-43.

Winkler LL, Kalejta RF. (2014). The 19S proteasome activator promotes human cytomegalovirus immediate ear-ly gene expression through proteolytic and nonproteolytic mechanisms. J Virol 88, 11782-90.

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2014 2015

HONORS and

AWARDSKevin Cope, Class of 2013, Lab of Jean-Michel AnéNSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee

Asuka Eguchi, Class of 2010, Lab of Aseem AnsariStem Cell and Regenerative Medicine Center (SCRMC) Training Award

Michelle Keller-Pearson, Class of 2015, Labs of Erin Silva & Jean-Michel AnéNSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee

Angela Myers, Class of 2013, Lab of Richard GourseNSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee

Kelli Pointer, Class of 2012, Lab of John KuoPreuss Award, Abstract will be presented at the upcomingmeeting of the Congress of Neurological Surgeons

Erica Schwotzer, Class of 2014, Lab of Arash BashirullahNSF Graduate Research Fellowship Awardee

Sarah Wilson, Class of 2014, Lab of Laura KnollDoD NDSEG fellowship

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FACULTY

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Alan AttieElected as Fellow of AAAS

Pam KreegerReceived the NIH new innovator award

John KuoElected to the Society of University Surgeons (SUS)Appointed to the SUS Basic Science Committee.Tumor Section Editor of “World Neurosurgery” Editorial Board of “Neurosurgery”.

Wan-Ju LiEmerging Investigator Award by the Stem Cell Research & Therapy journal.

ExceptionalThesis Award

How does a single hormone influence multiple processes during biological development? What new nuggets of knowledge could we glean if we took a holistic, systems-wide approach to microbiology?

These were the respective ambitious questions Rob Ihry and Saheed Imam – both newly minted PhDs from the Cellular & Molecular Biology program at UW-Madison – had set out to answer through their graduate research.

Ihry and Imam have both won the inaugural CMB Exceptional Thesis Award. This annual award honors CMB graduate students who have written and defended outstanding theses. As part of the award, Ihry and Imam will each receive $250 and a plaque, and their names will be added to a plaque that will housed in Bock Laboratories, the home of the CMB pro-gram on campus.

“Anyone who receives a PhD has already accomplished a significant amount,” says David Wassarman, Chair of the CMB graduate program. “We want to highlight some of the ex-ceptional research being conducted in the CMB graduate program, and I think we have two truly excellent award winners this year in Rob and Saheed.”

Ihry was a graduate student with Arash Bashirullah, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacy. His research focused on understanding how steroid hormones affect a wide variety of developmental processes with exquisite tissue and temporal specificity in the fruit fly. Ihry had to master a wide spectrum of techniques in graduate school and is grateful for the support and help he received from his colleagues and Bashirullah. “They all were criti-cally involved with my projects and nothing would have taken off without them by my side,” he says.

Now working as a Post Doctoral Scholar at the Novartis Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, MA, Ihry was delighted to win the Exceptional Thesis Award. “My whole life I have only been nominated for these [awards],” he says, “and to be recognized by such a well-ranked program and university is incredible.”


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ExceptionalThesis Award Imam’s graduate research, in the laboratory of Timothy Donohue, Professor in the Depart-ment of Bacteriology, involved creating and modeling a systems- level map of various met-abolic and transcriptional processes in the bacterium Rhodobacter sphaeroides. His gradu-ate research involved bringing together laboratory and computational expertise, and Imam thrived pursuing this interdisciplinary project. “I was given the freedom by Tim to chart my own course and develop my research,” says Imam, “ and I got to work with some great scien-tists in my lab and across the campus.”

Imam is now a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle, WA and sees winning the Exceptional Thesis award as icing on the cake of a great graduate school ex-perience. “There are a lot of talented graduate students in our program doing great research,” says Imam, “so to be singled out for an award really means a lot to me.”

Although Ihry and Imam pursued different scientific research, Wassarman was impressed by their ability to take ownership of their respective projects. “Both of them had tremendous work ethic and were dedicated to their research,” says Wassarman, “and they were true lead-ers in their research projects and drove both their research and the research of other people in their labs forward.”

Graduate students play a pivotal role in driving research forward at UW-Madison, and Was-sarman hopes the CMB Exceptional Thesis Award can allow the program to highlight one or two cases of outstanding graduate research. “I really want the community to see the great science that is being done here and what our graduate students can accomplish in their cho-sen fields,” he says.

Saheed ImamRobert Ihry


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Thanks For Your Support!

As one of the largest biological science graduate programs at UW-Madison, CMB has been committed to excellence in graduate education since the 1960’s. If you would like to make a gift to this long standing effort, visit the CMB website. Your generous support in greatly appreciated!

www.cmb.wisc.edu


CMB Donors2014-2015

Dr. Mary Cabell JonasMs. Mary Canman and Mr. Clyde Canman

Dr. Kristopher Carver and Ms. Elizabeth CarverDr. Karen Chinchilla and Mr. Stephen Ranjan

Mr. Somanda DharamDr. Sarah Kagan

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SHARE

YOURSTORY

We are currently in the process of updating our Alumni Database. We would greatly appreciate it if you would fill out the survey that can be found at the QR code below, or this link:

https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_9FgnsCaaONCnAQB

We would like to know of any updates in your personal and professional life for use in the next issue of The CMB Transcript. Be sure to keep us informed of address changes so that we can continue to send you a copy of the newsletter each season.

Would you like to speak about your career to current graduate students in the CMB Program and the biological sciences at UW? We are especially in need of alumni who work in areas other than tenure track faculty at large research institutions. Let us know if you’d like to be contacted about speaking to graduate students about your career. You can contact CMB at:

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[email protected]

Fun Campus News LargestRice Krispie

This year, a UW-Madison group called Project Freshman 15,000 set out to break the world re-cord for largest Rice Kripie Treat. The end product weighed in at 11,327 pounds. Crushing the previous Guinness World Record of 10,314 pounds. Luckily, they didn’t let this masterpiece go uneaten. After careful consideration, the CMB Office Staff decided that this moment in history couldn’t go unseen, or untasted. I emailed the group’s facebook page to find out if we were too late, but luckily there was still enough to go around. For only $3 a pound (or less if you buy in bulk), you could walk away with a nice brick of Krispies. The money benefitted Wisconsin charities, Camp Kesem, a camp that helps children who have been diagnosed with cancer as well as United Way of Dane County.

For more information on this group check out their website at: pf15000.com

Photo: Dennis Punzel / Wisconsin State Journal

Proud CMB Staff - Danielle Zurfluh and Jessica Skarlupka and their Krispie selfie.

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Program Coordinating Committee

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The Governing Body of CMBPaul Ahlquist Virology Focus Group Chair

Caroline Alexander Cancer Biology Focus Group Chair

Reid Alisch Recruiting Chair

Kurt Amann Admissions Chair & Cell Adhesion & Cytoskeleton Focus Group Chair

Sebastian Bednarek Plant Biology Focus Group Chair

Dave Brow RNA Focus Group Chair

Joseph Bruckner Student Representative

Tim Gomez Fellowship/Training Grant Liason

Anne Griep Developmental Biology & Regenerative Medicine Focus Group Chair

Jenya Grinblat Advising & Orientation Chair Guy Groblewski Membrane Biology & Protein Trafficking Focus Group Chair

Melissa Harrison Transcriptional Mechanisms Focus Group Chair

Eric Johannsen Recruiting Chair

Pam Kreeger Systems Biology Focus Group Chair

Bob Landick Molecular and Genome Biology of Microbes Focus Group Chair

Doug McNeel Immunology Focus Group Chair

Sarah Neuman Student Representative

Dave Pagliarini Molecular Metabolism Focus Group Chair

Donna Peters Curriculum Chair

Jarred Rensvold Student Representative

David Wassarman Program Chair

w w w.cmb.wisc .e du w w w.cmb.wisc .e du

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CELLULAR & MOLECULAR BIOLOGY PROGRAMUNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

413 BOCK LABORATORIES, 1525 LINDEN DRIVEMADISON, WI 53706

[email protected] / 608-262-3203

The CMB Transcript Content & DesignUndergraduate Student Assistant

CMB Program Coordinator

CMB Program Chair

Danielle Zurfluh

Jessica Skarlupka

David Wassarman

THE TRANSCRIPTProgram Administration
