3 Bullets: Mycobacterium tuberculosis (MTB) infects more than 1.5 billion people worldwide partly due to its ability to sense and adapt to the broad range of hostile environments that exist within hosts. To study how MTB controls its responses at a molecular level, ISB researchers and their collaborators at Seattle Biomed perturbed almost all MTB transcription factor regulators and identified the affected genes. This comprehensive map of molecular switches in…
3 Bullets: Dengue virus is the most prevalent mosquito-borne virus worldwide, infecting an estimated 400 million people per year and causing about 25,000 deaths. It’s necessary to understand the molecular mechanisms of dengue replication in order to develop an effective treatment. Researchers at ISB and Seattle BioMed developed a novel approach for identifying host proteins that associate with dengue replication machinery. By Thurston Herricks Dengue virus (DENV) infects approximately 400…
3 Bullets: The Institute for Systems Biology and Seattle BioMed have collaborated to reconstruct the gene regulatory network of the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Finely tuned gene regulation has allowed Mycobacterium tuberculosis to survive unnoticed in an apparently healthy host for decades; understanding those subtleties is critical for advancing treatment. The identification of co-regulated sets of genes and their regulatory influences offers validated predictions that will help guide future research…
The NIH's National Institute of General Medical Sciences has issued a Biotechnology Resource Grant of $10.9 million over five years to the National Center for Dynamic Interactome Research (ncdir.org) project. This project is a collaboration among The Rockefeller University, Institute for Systems Biology, Seattle BioMed, University of California at San Francisco, New York University and New York Structural Biology Center. Michael Rout, of The Rockefeller University, is the Program Director/Principal…
3 Bullets: Institute for Systems Biology and Seattle BioMed researchers collaborated and discovered a new protein post-translational modification in the human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Post-translational modifications are essential mechanisms used by cells to diversify protein functions and ISB scientists identified the rare phosphorylated tyrosine post translational modification on Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins using mass spectrometry. Inhibiting phosphotyrosine modified amino acids in Mycobacterium tuberculosis severely limits the growth of this widespread deadly…
Photo: Theo Knijnenburg, a research scientist in ISB's Shmulevich Lab, presentaed a summary of his work related to gene mutations and cancer drug sensitivity. Systems biology is about the culture as much as a scientific approach. ISB and Seattle BioMed have an inter-institutional agreement that enables the collective to benefit from shared knowledge and technology resources. For the second consecutive year, we held Lightning Talks (June 12) to allow researchers…
WHAT YOU HEARD IN THE NEWS: NPR aired this story (on Sept. 5) about research just published in the journal Nature Genetics suggesting that tuberculosis may have existed more than 70,000 years ago. Tuberculosis Hitched a Ride When Early Humans Left Africa ‘ “The old, traditional view was that tuberculosis emerged during the Neolithic transition when people started to domesticate animals and develop agriculture, which started about 10,000 years ago,”…
ISB will collaborate with Seattle BioMed and ETH Zurich on a $16.6 million tuberculosis grant from the National Institutes of Health. Seattle BioMed issued this press release today: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE SEATTLE, AUG. 15 — Seattle BioMed has been awarded a grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, that will take a comprehensive systems approach to the problem of tuberculosis…
Congratulations to ISB faculty member Jeff Ranish and his group on receiving a new grant for $156,000. The award is for collaborative work with Peter Myler at Seattle BioMed on “Base J and transcription termination in Leishmania.” Here’s the public health relevance statement from the proposal: Human infections with the various species of Leishmania parasite cause substantial morbidity and mortality in tropical and sub-tropical countries world-wide. These organisms appear to…
