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| Dr. Mikhail Alexeyev, associate professor of physiology and cell biology at the USA College of Medicine, holds the "Blue Fame" award with research assistant Viktoriya Pastukh. The award was presented to the lab by international nonprofit repository Addgene. |
Addgene repository facilitates the sharing of molecular biology resources such as plasmids. Plasmids are DNA-based research reagents commonly used in the life sciences. When scientists publish research papers, they deposit their associated plasmids at Addgene. Then, when other scientists read the publication, they have easy access to the plasmids needed to conduct future experiments.
The “Blue Flame” award is issued to a lab when one of the deposited DNA molecules (plasmids) is distributed to at least 100 labs nationally and internationally. Dr. Alexeyev said the plasmid that led to his lab’s award was generated to enable regulated gene overexpression and knockdown in cell lines of interest. “Initially, it was used to express DNA repair enzymes in mitochondria and to knock down expression of lactate dehydrogenase in rodent pulmonary microvascular endothelial cells (PMVECs). Since then, it has been used by several labs at USA to overexpress or downregulate various genes in the PMVECs and to study mitochondrial biology.”
Dr. Alexeyev said this award recognizes the national and international impact of research at USA. “This award means that at least 100 labs in the world use this particular plasmid and, therefore, are aware of research conducted at USA,” he said. “Together with other plasmids, results of our research have been distributed to more than 350 labs, which helps put research conducted here on the global map.”
The plasmids in Dr. Alexeyev’s lab have been requested by researches from several world premier institutions such as Harvard, CalTech, MIT, Yale, Princeton, Imperial College London, NIH (several institutes), McGill University, Korea Institute of Science and Technology, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Case Western Reserve University, University College London, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Duke, University of Oxford, Cornell, National Taiwan University, and National University of Singapore, among others.
For more information on Addgene, visit https://www.addgene.org/ .
