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| From left, Aishwarya Prakash, Ph.D.; graduate students Rasha Al-Rahahleh, Tabassum Tamanna, Marlo Thompson, Md Ibrahim; and Robert W. Sobol, Ph.D., attend the Southern Genome Maintenance Conference. |
Graduate students and faculty at the Frederick P. Whiddon College of Medicine presented research at the Southern Genome Maintenance Conference June 25-26 in Miami.
It was the second meeting of the conference, launched in 2018 by Robert W. Sobol, Ph.D., chief of the Molecular and Metabolic Oncology Program at the USA Health Mitchell Cancer Institute and a professor of pharmacology at the Whiddon College of Medicine.
“A major goal of this meeting is to foster collaborative research on the cellular processes that affect genomic instability in cancer upon environmental exposure and as a result of health disparities,” Sobol said.
Rasha Al-Rahahleh, a graduate student at the Whiddon College of Medicine, presented research on the dynamics of PAR formation and hydrolysis during DNA damage response. PAR response is an essential signaling mechanism that can be exploited to reveal how DNA repair factors come together in response to damage. “We developed a novel live cell PAR tracking assay with quantitative analysis to use for this purpose,” Al-Rahahleh said.
Fellow graduate student Md Ibrahim presented a talk about the role of base excision repair proteins in regulating checkpoint signaling during replication.
Aishwarya Prakash, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, gave a presentation that focused on scrutinizing variants of unknown significance found in Lynch syndrome patients to understand whether they have an increased risk for cancer. Lynch syndrome is an inherited disorder that increases the risk of colon cancer, endometrial cancer and several other cancers.
“We used novel biophysical and molecular tools developed in the laboratory for this purpose,” she said.
Graduate students Tabassum Tamanna and Marlo Thompson also presented posters at the conference. Thompson’s poster identified novel interaction regions that mediate the association between the NEIL1 DNA glycosylase and mitochondrial transcription factor A. She was awarded an honorable mention for her poster presentation. In addition, Thompson was the recipient of the Samuel J. Strada Travel and Enhancement Award that was used for travel expenses at the meeting.
Sobol chaired a session and gave a presentation honoring his mentor, the late Sam H. Wilson, M.D., a pioneering researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. The symposium was dedicated to Wilson, who was awarded the NIH Director Award in 2015, the highest honor for an NIH intramural scientist.
Over the past 30 years, Wilson’s group lead the field in understanding the structure/function relationship for several enzymes that help maintain the human genome, highlighted in more than 400 publications. “In addition, he was an outstanding mentor to his trainees and other young scientists in the DNA repair field,” Sobol said.
