Tag: SMU Department of Biological Sciences

Categories
Culture, Society & Family Earth & Climate Economics & Statistics Energy & Matter Events Fossils & Ruins Health & Medicine Learning & Education Mind & Brain Plants & Animals Researcher news Student researchers

SMU 2015 research efforts broadly noted in a variety of ways for world-changing impact

SMU scientists and their research have a global reach that is frequently noted, beyond peer publications and media mentions.

By Margaret Allen
SMU News & Communications
It was a good year for SMU faculty and student research efforts. Here is a small sampling of public and published acknowledgements during 2015:

Simmons, Diego Roman, SMU, education

Hot topic merits open access
Taylor & Francis, publisher of the online journal Environmental Education Research, lifted its subscription-only requirement to meet demand for an article on how climate change is taught to middle-schoolers in California.

Co-author of the research was Diego Román, assistant professor in the Department of Teaching and Learning, Annette Caldwell Simmons School of Education and Human Development.

Román’s research revealed that California textbooks are teaching sixth graders that climate change is a controversial debate stemming from differing opinions, rather than a scientific conclusion based on rigorous scientific evidence.

The article, “Textbooks of doubt: Using systemic functional analysis to explore the framing of climate change in middle-school science textbooks,” published in September. The finding generated such strong interest that Taylor & Francis opened access to the article.

bichaw_v054i049.indd

Research makes the cover of Biochemistry
Drugs important in the battle against cancer were tested in a virtual lab by SMU biology professors to see how they would behave in the human cell.

A computer-generated composite image of the simulation made the Dec. 15 cover of the journal Biochemistry.

Scientific articles about discoveries from the simulation were also published in the peer review journals Biochemistry and in Pharmacology Research & Perspectives.

The researchers tested the drugs by simulating their interaction in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp. Outcomes of interest were then tested in the Wise-Vogel wet lab.

The ongoing research is the work of biochemists John Wise, associate professor, and Pia Vogel, professor and director of the SMU Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery in Dedman College. Assisting them were a team of SMU graduate and undergraduate students.

The researchers developed the model to overcome the problem of relying on traditional static images for the structure of P-gp. The simulation makes it possible for researchers to dock nearly any drug in the protein and see how it behaves, then test those of interest in an actual lab.

To date, the researchers have run millions of compounds through the pump and have discovered some that are promising for development into pharmaceutical drugs to battle cancer.

Click here to read more about the research.

SMU, Simpson Rowe, sexual assault, video

Strong interest in research on sexual victimization
Teen girls were less likely to report being sexually victimized after learning to assertively resist unwanted sexual overtures and after practicing resistance in a realistic virtual environment, according to three professors from the SMU Department of Psychology.

The finding was reported in Behavior Therapy. The article was one of the psychology journal’s most heavily shared and mentioned articles across social media, blogs and news outlets during 2015, the publisher announced.

The study was the work of Dedman College faculty Lorelei Simpson Rowe, associate professor and Psychology Department graduate program co-director; Ernest Jouriles, professor; and Renee McDonald, SMU associate dean for research and academic affairs.

The journal’s publisher, Elsevier, temporarily has lifted its subscription requirement on the article, “Reducing Sexual Victimization Among Adolescent Girls: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial of My Voice, My Choice,” and has opened it to free access for three months.

Click here to read more about the research.

Consumers assume bigger price equals better quality
Even when competing firms can credibly disclose the positive attributes of their products to buyers, they may not do so.

Instead, they find it more lucrative to “signal” quality through the prices they charge, typically working on the assumption that shoppers think a high price indicates high quality. The resulting high prices hurt buyers, and may create a case for mandatory disclosure of quality through public policy.

That was a finding of the research of Dedman College’s Santanu Roy, professor, Department of Economics. Roy’s article about the research was published in February in one of the blue-ribbon journals, and the oldest, in the field, The Economic Journal.

Published by the U.K.’s Royal Economic Society, The Economic Journal is one of the founding journals of modern economics. The journal issued a media briefing about the paper, “Competition, Disclosure and Signaling,” typically reserved for academic papers of broad public interest.

The Journal of Physical Chemistry A

Chemistry research group edits special issue
Chemistry professors Dieter Cremer and Elfi Kraka, who lead SMU’s Computational and Theoretical Chemistry Group, were guest editors of a special issue of the prestigious Journal of Physical Chemistry. The issue published in March.

The Computational and Theoretical research group, called CATCO for short, is a union of computational and theoretical chemistry scientists at SMU. Their focus is research in computational chemistry, educating and training graduate and undergraduate students, disseminating and explaining results of their research to the broader public, and programming computers for the calculation of molecules and molecular aggregates.

The special issue of Physical Chemistry included 40 contributions from participants of a four-day conference in Dallas in March 2014 that was hosted by CATCO. The 25th Austin Symposium drew 108 participants from 22 different countries who, combined, presented eight plenary talks, 60 lectures and about 40 posters.

CATCO presented its research with contributions from Cremer and Kraka, as well as Marek Freindorf, research assistant professor; Wenli Zou, visiting professor; Robert Kalescky, post-doctoral fellow; and graduate students Alan Humason, Thomas Sexton, Dani Setlawan and Vytor Oliveira.

There have been more than 75 graduate students and research associates working in the CATCO group, which originally was formed at the University of Cologne, Germany, before moving to SMU in 2009.

519ca82d-6517-4df9-b5ac-26e5458882ef

Vertebrate paleontology recognized with proclamation
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings proclaimed Oct. 11-17, 2015 Vertebrate Paleontology week in Dallas on behalf of the Dallas City Council.

The proclamation honored the 75th Annual Meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, which was jointly hosted by SMU’s Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences in Dedman College and the Perot Museum of Science and Nature. The conference drew to Dallas some 1,200 scientists from around the world.

Making research presentations or presenting research posters were: faculty members Bonnie Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Michael Polcyn, Neil Tabor and Dale Winkler; adjunct research assistant professor Alisa Winkler; research staff member Kurt Ferguson; post-doctoral researchers T. Scott Myers and Lauren Michael; and graduate students Matthew Clemens, John Graf, Gary Johnson and Kate Andrzejewski.

The host committee co-chairs were Anthony Fiorillo, adjunct research professor; and Louis Jacobs, professor. Committee members included Polcyn; Christopher Strganac, graduate student; Diana Vineyard, research associate; and research professor Dale Winkler.

KERA radio reporter Kat Chow filed a report from the conference, explaining to listeners the science of vertebrate paleontology, which exposes the past, present and future of life on earth by studying fossils of animals that had backbones.

SMU earthquake scientists rock scientific journal

Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)
Modelled pressure changes caused by injection and production. (Nature Communications/SMU)

Findings by the SMU earthquake team reverberated across the nation with publication of their scientific article in the prestigious British interdisciplinary journal Nature, ranked as one of the world’s most cited scientific journals.

The article reported that the SMU-led seismology team found that high volumes of wastewater injection combined with saltwater extraction from natural gas wells is the most likely cause of unusually frequent earthquakes occurring in the Dallas-Fort Worth area near the small community of Azle.

The research was the work of Dedman College faculty Matthew Hornbach, associate professor of geophysics; Heather DeShon, associate professor of geophysics; Brian Stump, SMU Albritton Chair in Earth Sciences; Chris Hayward, research staff and director geophysics research program; and Beatrice Magnani, associate professor of geophysics.

The article, “Causal factors for seismicity near Azle, Texas,” published online in late April. Already the article has been downloaded nearly 6,000 times, and heavily shared on both social and conventional media. The article has achieved a ranking of 270, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 144,972 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and 98th percentile of 626 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

“It has a very high impact factor for an article of its age,” said Robert Gregory, professor and chair, SMU Earth Sciences Department.

The scientific article also was entered into the record for public hearings both at the Texas Railroad Commission and the Texas House Subcommittee on Seismic Activity.

Researchers settle long-debated heritage question of “The Ancient One”

The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)
The skull of Kennewick Man and a sculpted bust by StudioEIS based on forensic facial reconstruction by sculptor Amanda Danning. (Credit: Brittany Tatchell)

The research of Dedman College anthropologist and Henderson-Morrison Professor of Prehistory David Meltzer played a role in settling the long-debated and highly controversial heritage of “Kennewick Man.”

Also known as “The Ancient One,” the 8,400-year-old male skeleton discovered in Washington state has been the subject of debate for nearly two decades. Argument over his ancestry has gained him notoriety in high-profile newspaper and magazine articles, as well as making him the subject of intense scholarly study.

Officially the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Kennewick Man was discovered in 1996 and radiocarbon dated to 8500 years ago.

Because of his cranial shape and size he was declared not Native American but instead ‘Caucasoid,’ implying a very different population had once been in the Americas, one that was unrelated to contemporary Native Americans.

But Native Americans long have claimed Kennewick Man as theirs and had asked for repatriation of his remains for burial according to their customs.

Meltzer, collaborating with his geneticist colleague Eske Willerslev and his team at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, in June reported the results of their analysis of the DNA of Kennewick in the prestigious British journal Nature in the scientific paper “The ancestry and affiliations of Kennewick Man.”

The results were announced at a news conference, settling the question based on first-ever DNA evidence: Kennewick Man is Native American.

The announcement garnered national and international media attention, and propelled a new push to return the skeleton to a coalition of Columbia Basin tribes. Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) introduced the Bring the Ancient One Home Act of 2015 and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has offered state assistance for returning the remains to Native Tribes.

Science named the Kennewick work one of its nine runners-up in the highly esteemed magazine’s annual “Breakthrough of the Year” competition.

The research article has been viewed more than 60,000 times. It has achieved a ranking of 665, which puts it in the 99th percentile of 169,466 tracked articles of a similar age in all journals, and in the 94th percentile of 958 tracked articles of a similar age in Nature.

In “Kennewick Man: coming to closure,” an article in the December issue of Antiquity, a journal of Cambridge University Press, Meltzer noted that the DNA merely confirmed what the tribes had known all along: “We are him, he is us,” said one tribal spokesman. Meltzer concludes: “We presented the DNA evidence. The tribal members gave it meaning.”

Click here to read more about the research.

Prehistoric vacuum cleaner captures singular award

Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)
Paleontologists Louis L. Jacobs, SMU, and Anthony Fiorillo, Perot Museum, have identified a new species of marine mammal from bones recovered from Unalaska, an Aleutian island in the North Pacific. (Hillsman Jackson, SMU)

Science writer Laura Geggel with Live Science named a new species of extinct marine mammal identified by two SMU paleontologists among “The 10 Strangest Animal Discoveries of 2015.”

The new species, dubbed a prehistoric hoover by London’s Daily Mail online news site, was identified by SMU paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs, a professor in the Roy M. Huffington Department of Earth Sciences, Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, and paleontologist and SMU adjunct research professor Anthony Fiorillo, vice president of research and collections and chief curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science.

Jacobs and Fiorillo co-authored a study about the identification of new fossils from the oddball creature Desmostylia, discovered in the same waters where the popular “Deadliest Catch” TV show is filmed. The hippo-like creature ate like a vacuum cleaner and is a new genus and species of the only order of marine mammals ever to go extinct — surviving a mere 23 million years.

Desmostylians, every single species combined, lived in an interval between 33 million and 10 million years ago. Their strange columnar teeth and odd style of eating don’t occur in any other animal, Jacobs said.

SMU campus hosted the world’s premier physicists

The SMU Department of Physics hosted the “23rd International Workshop on Deep Inelastic Scattering and Related Subjects” from April 27-May 1, 2015. Deep Inelastic Scattering is the process of probing the quantum particles that make up our universe.

As noted by the CERN Courier — the news magazine of the CERN Laboratory in Geneva, which hosts the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest science experiment — more than 250 scientists from 30 countries presented more than 200 talks on a multitude of subjects relevant to experimental and theoretical research. SMU physicists presented at the conference.

The SMU organizing committee was led by Fred Olness, professor and chair of the SMU Department of Physics in Dedman College, who also gave opening and closing remarks at the conference. The committee consisted of other SMU faculty, including Jodi Cooley, associate professor; Simon Dalley, senior lecturer; Robert Kehoe, professor; Pavel Nadolsky, associate professor, who also presented progress on experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider; Randy Scalise, senior lecturer; and Stephen Sekula, associate professor.

Sekula also organized a series of short talks for the public about physics and the big questions that face us as we try to understand our universe.

Click here to read more about the research.

Categories
Health & Medicine Videos

Drugs behave as predicted in computer model of key protein, enabling cancer drug discovery

New model allows pharmacological researchers to dock nearly any drug and see how it behaves in P-glycoprotein, a protein in the cell associated with failure of chemotherapy

Drugs important in the battle against cancer responded the way they do in real life and behaved according to predictions when tested in a computer-generated model of one of the cell’s key molecular pumps — the protein P-glycoprotein, or P-gp.

Biologists at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, developed the computer generated model to overcome the problem of relying on only static images for the structure of P-gp, said biologist John G. Wise, lead author on the journal article announcing the advancement.

The new SMU model allows researchers to dock nearly any drug in the P-gp protein and see how it will actually behave in P-gp’s pump, said Wise, an associate professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences.

“The value of this fundamental research is that it generates dynamic mechanisms that let us understand something in biochemistry, in biology,” he said. “And by understanding P-gp in such detail, we can now think of ways to better and more specifically inhibit it.”

P-gp is the cellular pump that protects cells by pumping out toxins. But that’s a problem when P-gp targets chemotherapy drugs as toxic, preventing chemo from killing cancer cells. Scientists are searching for ways to inhibit P-gp’s pumping action.

The SMU researchers tested Tariquidar, a new P-gp inhibitor still in clinical trials. Inhibitors offer hope for stopping P-gp’s rejection of chemotherapeutics by stalling the protein’s pumping action. Pharmacology researchers disagree, however, on where exactly Tariquidar binds in P-gp.

When run through the SMU model, Tariquidar behaved as expected: It wasn’t effectively pumped from the cell and the researchers observed that it prefers to bind high in the protein.

“Now we have more details on how Tariquidar inhibits P-gp, where it inhibits and what it’s actually binding to,” Wise said.

SMU researchers report that their computer model simulation reveals the binding sites of Tariquidar — a P-gp inhibitor — as the “pump” opens and closes. (Image: James McCormick)
SMU researchers report that their computer model simulation reveals the binding sites of Tariquidar (orange blob) — a P-gp inhibitor. (Image: James McCormick)

Also using the model, the researchers discovered greater detail than previously known about the behavior of other drugs as well, and how those drugs bind in P-gp to stop its pumping action.

The study was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. The lab was recently awarded a second NIH grant for the research.

The findings are published in the journal Biochemistry. The article, “Multiple drug transport pathways through human P-glycoprotein,” is published online in advance of print at NIH’s PubMed Central.

A still image of the modeled protein in action will appear on the cover of the October through December issues of Biochemistry.

Testing the virtual P-gp model by virtually docking real drugs
Wise and his colleagues tested one of the workhorse drugs of chemotherapy, daunorubicin, a close cousin of Adriamycin.

An aggressive chemotherapeutic, daunorubicin stops DNA replication in the cell, and is a classic target for P-gp to pump out of a cell, Wise said.

“For a long time, it’s been thought that there are at least a couple of distinct binding sites for drugs,” Wise said. “Sure enough, with our models, we found that daunorubicin, at least, prefers to bind on one side of the P-gp model, while verapamil – a commonly prescribed blood pressure medicine – prefers the other side.”

SMU researchers report that their computer model simulation reveals the binding sites of Tariquidar — a P-gp inhibitor — as the “pump” opens and closes. (Image: James McCormick)
SMU researchers report that their computer model simulation reveals the binding sites of Tariquidar (orange blob) — a P-gp inhibitor — as the “pump” opens and closes. (Image: James McCormick)

Not only did the researchers show computationally that there are two different starting points for drugs, they also showed that there are two different pathways to get the drugs through.

“The two different drugs start at different sites and they’re funneled to the outside by being pushed by the protein,” Wise said. “But the actual parts of the protein that are pushing the drugs out are different.”

Wise and his co-authors, SMU biologists Pia Vogel and James McCormick, created the P-gp computer-generated simulation using SMU’s High Performance Computer, ManeFrame.

Molecular model can aid in fight against multi-drug resistance of cancer cells
The capability of watching molecular machinery up close, while doing its job the way it does in real life, may spark new drug discoveries to fight cancer.

“Having an accurate model that actually moves – that shows the dynamics of the thing – is incredibly helpful in developing therapies against a molecular target to inhibit it. The only other ways to do it are blind, and the chances of success using blind methods are very low,” Wise said.

“Scientists have tried for 30 years to find inhibitors of this pump and have done it without knowing the structure and with only little knowledge about the mechanism, screening more or less blindly for compounds that inhibit the thing,” Wise said. “They found drugs that worked in the test tube and that worked in cultured cells, but that didn’t work in the patient. With our model, because we can see the pump moving, we can probably predict better what’s going to make an inhibitor actually work well.”

Vogel and Wise led a team of researchers in using the P-gp model to virtually screen millions of publically available drug-like compounds.

Verapamil (green blob), inhibits the P-gp pump. But until now, the workings of the pump could not be observed so researchers could only speculate where Varapamil “binds” in P-gp. SMU researchers report that their computer model simulation reveals Varapamil’s binding sites while the “pump” opens and closes. (Image: McCormick)
Verapamil (green blob), inhibits the P-gp pump. Until now, the workings of the pump could not be observed so researchers didn’t know exactly where Varapamil “binds” in P-gp. SMU researchers report that their simulation reveals the binding sites. (Image: McCormick)

They discovered three new drug leads that could ultimately inhibit P-gp and offer better odds of survival to prostate cancer patients. The researchers reported those findings this month in the journal Pharmacology Research & Perspectives, http://bit.ly/1XGjN5w.

New SMU model simulates molecular machinery in action
Researchers look for drug compounds that can temporarily stop or inhibit the P-gp pump, so that the chemotherapy drugs that enter the cancer cell will stay there and do the job of killing the cancer. Finding the right pump inhibitor requires understanding the pumping action. That’s difficult without seeing the pump at work.

The structures of proteins similar to P-gp have been previously available in a static state through X-ray crystallography. Scientists use X-ray crystallography as a tool that essentially draws the details of biological structures by identifying their atomic and molecular structure through diffraction of X-rays by the atoms themselves.

Scientists often contribute the resulting protein structures to the U.S. Protein Data Bank repository for public use.

Detailed data combined with several trillion calculations produced model
To build the P-gp model, Wise used structures from the repository, showing various stages of transport, to simulate four points of reference. From there, SMU’s ManeFrame supercomputer was fed parameters and characteristics of the protein as well as how it should behave physically, including when kinetic energy was added to bring the protein and its surrounding membrane and water up to body temperature. The animated model resulted from calculating differences between two structures and using targeted molecular dynamics programs to slightly nudge the model to the next step.

“You do that several million times and make several trillion calculations and you arrive at the next structure,” Wise said. “In this way, we can nudge P-gp through a full catalytic transport cycle.”

Finally, using a docking program, the researchers individually introduced daunorubicin and other drugs into the protein, and watched the drugs move through P-gp’s catalytic cycle.

“What happened was — the drugs moved,” Wise said. “And they moved the way they should move, clinically, biochemically, physiologically, to pump the compounds out of the cell.”

Vogel added that, “in some of the zoom-ins of the model, you can actually see the amino acids paddle down the drugs.”

Further challenging and testing the model
The researchers ran a critical control to further test if the model worked.

“We thought maybe anything you put in the protein, relevant or not, would get pumped through. So we put in something that is not a transport substrate of P-gp, something that biochemically would never be transported by P-gp,” Wise said. “We put it in, starting where daunorubicin is effectively pumped out, and very quickly the compound left the protein — but it left the opposite way, back into the cell. This experiment gave us more confidence that what we are seeing in these models is reflecting what happens in the cell.”

Wise admits that until he saw it for himself, even he had doubts the virtual P-gp model would behave like real-life P-gp.

“It’s a crude approximation of a complex, sophisticated human protein, but it’s so much better than the static images available now,” Wise said. “I’ve got to emphasize for all the disbelievers, for the ‘culture of doubters’ out there, that this model works — it moves the drugs through the membrane. That speaks for itself. What P-gp does in the cell, cancerous or normal, it does in our simulations.”

Categories
Health & Medicine Researcher news Videos

Researchers discover new drug-like compounds that may improve odds for men battling prostate cancer

New drug-like compounds have low toxicity to noncancerous cells, but inhibit the human protein often responsible for chemotherapy failure

Researchers at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, have discovered three new drug-like compounds that could ultimately offer better odds of survival to prostate cancer patients.

The drug-like compounds can be modified and developed into medicines that target a protein in the human body that is responsible for chemotherapy resistance in cancers, said biochemist Pia D. Vogel, lead author on the scientific paper reporting the discovery.

So far there’s no approved drug on the market that reverses cancer chemotherapy resistance caused by P-glycoprotein, or P-gp for short, said Vogel, a biochemistry professor at SMU. One potential drug, Tariquidar, is currently in clinical trials, but in the past, other potential drugs have failed at that stage.

“The problem when a person has cancer, is that the treatment itself is composed of cellular toxins — the chemotherapeutics that prevent the cells from dividing. Usually upon the first chemotherapy treatment the cancer responds well, and initially goes away. Ideally it doesn’t come back,” said Vogel, director of SMU’s Center for Drug Discovery, Design and Delivery.

Three drug-like compounds bind in human P-glycoprotein, reversing chemotherapy resistance in prostate cancer cells in culture. (Image, James McCormick)
Three drug-like compounds bind in human P-glycoprotein, reversing chemotherapy resistance in prostate cancer cells in culture. (Image, James McCormick)

“Sometimes, however, the cancer returns,” she said. “The reason often is that some of the cancer cells “learn,” after the first rounds of chemotherapy, how to make a lot of this P-gp pump. The normal function of P-gp is to pump toxins from cells, so it has evolved to protect cells against a large variety of toxins, including almost all currently available chemotherapeutics. After initial exposure, the cells surviving the chemo make so much P-gp that it allows the cells to pump the chemotherapy drugs straight back out of the cells during subsequent rounds of treatment.”

As a result, P-gp causes resistance of the diseased cells to a majority of drugs currently available for the treatment of cancer, as well as drugs used for treatment of infectious diseases like HIV/AIDS.

Using computer-generated model speeds up the drug discovery process
The new drug-like compounds discovered by Vogel and her co-authors offer hope that using a computer-generated P-gp model, developed to accurately mimic the physical, chemical and biological functions of the protein in the human body, will speed up the drug discovery process and work in real life as well.

P-glycoprotein's pumping action is stalled, when a drug-like compound (dark blue) prevents the power source (red) from being used by P-glycoprotein, the protein that transports toxins from a cell. (Image: James McCormick)
P-glycoprotein’s pumping action is stalled, when a drug-like compound (dark blue) prevents the power source (red) from being used by P-glycoprotein, the protein that transports toxins from a cell. (Image: James McCormick)

“These are not drugs yet. We still have to develop them before they can go in the clinic,” Vogel said. “But what we know now is that they’re not toxic — they have low toxicity to noncancerous cells, so that’s a pretty good predictor that they may be good candidates for drug development. But we need to do much more work.”

A pharmaceutical hit compound, like those discovered by Vogel and her co-authors, is a compound that is a promising candidate for chemical modification so it can eventually be delivered to patients as a therapeutic drug. In the case reported here, the compounds were commercially available for testing. The timeline from drug discovery to development to clinical trials and approval can take a decade or more.

Vogel and her co-authors, SMU biologist John G. Wise, and doctoral candidates Courtney A. Follit and Frances K. Brewer, reported their findings in the journal Pharmacology Research & Perspectives. The article, “In silico identified targeted inhibitors of P-glycoprotein in culture,” is published online at http://bit.ly/1JjFizg.

The research was funded in part by the National Institutes of Health. The lab was recently awarded a second grant from the Institute.

Researchers virtually screened 15 million drug-like compounds via SMU supercomputer
The SMU researchers discovered the three hit compounds after virtually screening more than 15 million small drug-like compounds made publically available in digital form from the pharmacology database Zinc at the University of California, San Francisco.

Using SMU’s ManeFrame high performance computer, Wise ran the compounds through a computer-generated model of P-gp. The virtual model, designed and built by Wise, is the first computational microscope of its kind to simulate the actual behavior of P-gp in the human body, including interactions with drug-like compounds while taking on different shapes.

The ultra-high throughput computational searches by ManeFrame led the researchers to 300 compounds that looked like they may inhibit P-gp. The researchers then tested 38 of those in their physical lab and found four that inhibited the biochemical function of P-gp, stopping it in its action.

Each of the four compounds was then tested in the lab to see how it would affect a line of prostate cancer cells relatively sensitive to the chemotherapeutic Paclitaxel, commonly used to treat prostate cancer patients. Also, each was tested on a companion cell line already multi-drug resistant, as if the patient already had undergone chemotherapy using Paclitaxel.

The researchers found that with three of the four compounds, they were able to push back the sensitivity of the resistant cancer line to the level of the non-resistant one.

“So the compounds re-sensitized the cancer cell lines to a really high degree, just as if the cancer was seeing the chemotherapy for the first time,” Vogel said.

About 14 percent of men will be diagnosed over their lifetime with prostate cancer, according to the National Cancer Institute. Survival is highest if diagnosed early before it has spread, the institute reports.

Categories
Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers

Prevention: Is Organic Food Really Better For You?

What you need to know about the safety and health of your food

Prevention Bauer Chhabra organic fruit fly

Health and science reporter Richard Laliberte with Prevention Magazine has covered research carried out in the fruit fly lab of SMU biologist Johannes H. Bauer. The research by Plano, Texas high school student Ria Chhabra is featured in the article, “Is Organic Food Really Better For You?,” published Aug. 21.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Johannes Bauer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.

Related links

More SMU Research news

Ward, novel music, SMUThe Undying Radio: Familiarity breeds content when it comes to listeners and music
Mosquito biting 150x120Mosquito indexing system identifies best time to act against potential West Nile Virus outbreaks
Sweden, Project Support, SMU, McDonald, JourilesSweden, SMU psychologists partner to launch parenting program that reduces child abuse
H2S Thumbnail 150x120Chemical probe confirms that body makes its own rotten egg gas, H2S, to benefit health
Bitcoin 150x120Study: High-volume Bitcoin exchanges less likely to fail, but more likely to suffer breach

Bauer, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences, mentored Chhabra in her research to examine whether there would be health differences to fruit flies fed an organic diet or a nonorganic diet. Chhabra’s study found that flies fed an organic diet fared better on important health tests, particularly fertility and longevity.

Read the article.

EXCERPT:

By Richard Laliberte
Prevention Magazine
The Chhabra household of Plano, TX, couldn’t resolve a family dispute. “My husband and I are vegetarian,” says Babita Jain Chhabra. “Our family already eats more fruits and vegetables than most people, and they’re expensive.” Her husband wanted to buy cheap produce at Walmart. Babita said no—the family should buy organic products because their two children needed the healthiest food possible.

“She just assumed organic was healthier,” says Babita’s 16-year-old daughter, Ria, channeling her father’s skepticism. “That’s what sparked my interest.”

Ria, who was only 13 when the organic debate broke out at her dinner table, decided to settle it. She launched a middle school science fair project that bloomed into more than 2 years of research and eventually involved two Southern Methodist University researchers, Santharam Kolli and Johannes H. Bauer. This year, their study, which found that fruit flies that ate organic foods did better in almost every health measure the researchers tracked (living longer, laying more eggs, resisting stress better, and acting livelier) than those that ate conventionally grown food, was published in PLOS One, an online peer-reviewed scientific journal.

For the Chhabras, it was case closed. They are now buying organic. “Because of Ria’s experiment, we know that in the long run, organic food will be better for us than anything else,” Babita says.

Most Americans are dabbling in organics—81% of families buy organic at least some of the time, according to a 2013 survey by the Organic Trade Association. And there are plenty of experts who think everyone should be as decisive as the Chhabras. One of them is Charles Benbrook, PhD, a research professor at Washington State University’s Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Last year, when a widely publicized Stanford University study analyzing more than 200 research papers comparing the benefits of eating organic versus conventionally grown food concluded that organic food isn’t any healthier, Dr. Benbrook corrected their math. Utilizing government data on pesticide toxicity, he countered with his own findings that there’s a full 94% reduction in health risks if you eat organic rather than conventional foods. The Stanford researchers had looked at nine old studies about pesticide residue on produce and noted that organics have 30% fewer toxins than conventional crops—but failed to calculate the health benefits based upon the most recent USDA data on actual residues in food.

Read the article.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

Categories
Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Plants & Animals Researcher news SMU In The News Student researchers

The Sydney Morning Herald: Flying in the face of the organic debate

Unlikely as it may sound, a 16-year-old’s school science project has added weight to the organic versus conventional debate

Sydney Herald, Bauer, Chhabra, SMU, fruit flies, organic

Life & Style reporter Sarah Berry with The Sydney Morning Herald has covered research carried out in the fruit fly lab of SMU biologist Johannes H. Bauer by Plano, Texas, high school student Ria Chhabra. The article, “Flying in the face of the organic debate,” published April 25.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Dr. Johannes Bauer in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call SMU News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email SMU News at news@smu.edu.

Related links

More SMU Research news

Fruit flies fed organic diets are healthier than flies fed nonorganic diets, study finds
SMU Lyle School of EngineeringCenter for Creative Leadership to study innovative learning method of SMU Lyle School of Engineering
SMU, Project Support, Department of PsychologyParenting program tackles child abuse and neglect among formerly homeless families

Bauer, an assistant professor in SMU’s Department of Biological Sciences, mentored Chhabra in her research to examine whether there would be health differences to fruit flies fed an organic diet or a nonorganic diet. Chhabra’s study found that flies fed an organic diet fared better on important health tests, particularly fertility and longevity.

Read the article.

EXCERPT:

By Sarah Berry
The Sydney Morning Herald
A 16-year-old’s school science project has added weight to the argument that eating organically has greater health benefits than eating conventionally-grown foods.
Ria Chhabra overheard her parents debating the topic and decided to see if she could find out the answer for herself, the New York Times reports.

To test whether organically grown food provides greater health benefits than its conventionally grown counterpart, Chhabra turned to fruit flies; they have around 75 per cent of the genes that cause disease in humans and have a short life span so a variety of biological factors can be studied in a reasonably short period of time.

Her experiment was conducted over her summer break with the help of an assistant professor and a researcher at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It won her top honours in a national science competition and has now been published in the respected Plos One journal.

Half of the flies in the experiment were fed an organic diet and the other half a conventional one. She then tested levels of fertility, stress resistance, physical activity and longevity.

They found that eating organically improved levels on virtually all fronts.
“These data suggest that organic foods are more nutritionally balanced than conventional foods, or contain higher levels of nutrients, leading to improved fertility and longevity,” they said.

Similarly, flies on the organic diet were more active and had greater stress resistance.
The main exception to these findings was that the diet had to be balanced. Flies that were fed only one type of organic food had shorter lifespans and were less fertile than those fed a balanced conventional diet.

Read the article.

Follow SMUResearch.com on Twitter.

For more information, www.smuresearch.com.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.