News & Events

 

November 30, 2004

It’s been an exciting month in the department— so much so that I’ve not had a chance to make note of all the happenings and achievements. I shall undoubtedly continue to be overwhelmed, however, so I might as well take a few moments while I have them to congratulate a few individuals:

First, a hearty “well done!” goes to our residents and fellows. I was recently informed that, of the 200 institutions in North America and 350 world wide that submitted abstracts for the forthcoming scientific meeting of the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology in San Antonio, NYU is in the top seven in terms of number of accepted abstracts that were first-authored by residents or fellows. As the letter from USCAP put it, “This is an excellent achievement, for which credit and congratulations are due both to the residents and fellows and to the faculty.”

The USCAP is the premier academic society of anatomic, surgical and diagnostic molecular pathology, and its annual scientific meeting is the largest gathering of physician-pathologists in the world. Its journals, Laboratory Investigation and Modern Pathology, are published by Nature Publishing Group, and its website currently receives more than 900,000 hits per month.

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that our first residency interview day was a smashing success. We decided to take a new approach to the interviews, scheduling them on weekends so that the interviewees could have more time to interact with the faculty and current residents and really get a sense of the department without having to take time off from work or school. We came together Saturday morning for a breakfast and presentations about the various facets of our residency training program, proceeded to some interviews, had a break for lunch, did more interviews and a tour of the three hospitals, and closed the day with a convivial wine-and-cheese hour. The response from candidates and participating residents and faculty has been overwhelmingly positive, and we have a crop of outstanding interviewees. The challenge will be narrowing our choices!

One of our faculty members in the molecular oncology section, Brian Dynlacht, published some very interesting work in Molecular Cell this month. The paper can be accessed here and has been cited by Faculty of 1000 (http://www.facultyof1000.com/)

The Dynlacht lab is seeking to understand the gene regulatory networks that control mammalian cell growth and differentiation. They use a novel “ChIP on chip” technique that combines chromatin immunoprecipitation (ChIP) to enrich for genomic fragments bound by a key regulatory protein with novel DNA microarray chips containing 13,000 human promoters to define targets of regulatory proteins in a genome-wide manner. With this strategy, the Dynlacht lab has been able to define a large number of direct targets for the E2F and retinoblastoma protein (RB) families. RB is a tumor suppressor whose inactivation plays a major role in human cancer. Transcriptional targets are then confirmed using a combination of genomics, bioinformatics, and genetic approaches with human (RNA interference) and mouse (gene knockout) cells.

In this most recent paper, Dynlacht and colleagues studied the factors that inhibit E2F and recruit histone deacetylases (HDACs) and other chromatin modifying factors to repress genes and thereby contribute to cell cycle arrest. They examined the mechanisms underlying three different mammalian growth arrest pathways that require the pRB tumor suppressor family and found a core set of genes bound by E2F and p130 (a pocket protein related to the RB family) under all three growth arrest conditions. This set unexpectedly included a number of genes that are involved not in cell cycle regulation but in a variety processes from metabolism to mitochondrial biogenesis. Expression of these genes apparently specifies a cell's growth state. Identification of these E2F4/p130 targets enabled Dynlacht and colleagues to perform motif-finding algorithms that predicted binding by a second protein, nuclear respiratory factor-1 (NRF1), a factor that is known to promote mitochondrial biogenesis but has lacked any previous connection to E2F. Their experiments confirmed this prediction and suggest that NRF1 plays an unexpected role in regulating cell cycle genes as well as those involved in mitochondrial function.

Brian Dynlacht has been on a roll this month, as he was also selected to represent NYU for the Irma T. Hirschl and Monique Weill-Caulier Research Award. These are five-year awards given to outstanding young scientists to support their laboratory research.

Speaking of awards, I should also mention that Nina Bhardwaj was selected by Scientific American as one of the Top 50 Outstanding Leaders in Science and Technology in 2004. Congratulations, Nina!

And, in October, Dan Littman was one of ten scientists honored by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg as recipients of the 2004 Mayor's Awards for Excellence in Science and Technology.

The awards, sponsored by the New York Academy of Sciences, were part of "Science & the City Day," a day-long series of events organized by the Academy to celebrate New York City's many contributions to science and to promote science entrepreneurship in the city.

Dan Littman is the Kimmel Professor of Molecular Immunology and co-director of the Molecular Pathogenesis program at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine (of which yours truly is a proud member). This award recognized Dan’s research on new approaches to the treatment of AIDS and autoimmune diseases.
We rejoice with our colleagues in these well-deserved honors.

David Roth


(Click here to read the November 30th News & Events)
(Click here to read the October 6th News & Events)