Prestigious postdoctoral fellowship for structural biology and infection research in Umeå

Text written by Himanshu Sharma and Nóra Lehotai. Photo: Himanshu Sharma by the Titan Krios cryo-electron microscope at the Umeå Centre for Electron Microscopy (UCEM). Credit: Kai Ehrenbolger. 

Himanshu Sharma, a postdoctoral researcher in Jonas Barandun’s lab at MIMS and the Department of Molecular Biology, Umeå University, got awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Individual Fellowship, giving him the opportunity to carry out the proposed research project with the financial support of 191 000 € over two years.

“I am exhilarated to have received this research funding. This fellowship gives me an opportunity to investigate the intriguing infection mechanism of microsporidia through cutting-edge methods in structural biology. Microsporidia are a class of obligate parasites that employ unique methods to infect almost all organisms, including bees, fish, farmed animals and humans. Apart from being an enormous environmental and healthcare challenge, these organisms also exhibit a range of evolutionarily distinctive cellular processes. To understand these interesting but understudied pathogens, I am going to combine my existing knowledge in RNA biology with cryo-EM to understand the critical events in the microsporidia lifecycle. Through these advancements, I aim to develop an understanding of potential drug targets to curb the growing menace of microsporidia infections.”- he commented. 

Read more: Prestigious postdoctoral fellowship for structural biology and infection research in Umeå

Identification of a protective protein that reduces the severity of COVID-19

Written by Elin Thysell

Researchers at Umeå University and their international collaborative partners have discovered that increased levels of the protein OAS1 are associated with reduced mortality and less severe disease requiring ventilation among patients with COVID-19. Using drugs that boost OAS1 levels could be explored to try to improve these outcomes. The findings were published on 26th February 2021 in Nature Medicine.

“Our analysis shows evidence that OAS1 has a protective effect against COVID-19 susceptibility and severity,” explains Dr. Elin Thysell, researcher at Medical Biosciences and Deputy Project Manager for PREDICT. PREDICT is the newly launched initiative at the Medical Faculty with the goal of finding tools early that make it possible to prevent or alleviate diseases by developing the use of biobank samples in the healthcare area. “This is a very exciting development in the race to identify potential therapies to treat patients because there are already therapies in pre-clinical development that boost OAS1 and could be explored for their effect against SARS-CoV-2 infection.” says Johan Normark, specialist doctor in infectious diseases at Umeå University Hospital and principal investigator of the CoVUm study. This clinical study for COVID-19, carried out as a collaboration between Region Västerbotten and Umeå University, studies immunity and the course of the disease furthermore, why the disease strikes so hard on certain individuals.

Read more: Identification of a protective protein that reduces the severity of COVID-19

Finding a new way to uncover targets for future antibiotics

Text by Gabrielle Beans Picon

How do you take great ideas and turn them into innovative research? In this case the Integrated Science Lab, IceLab, offered up some help in the form of funding for a postdoc who could act as a bridge between computational and experimental research areas, launching a project by Professor Maria Fällman and Senior Research Assistant Kemal Avican, both at the Department of Molecular Biology and MIMS. 

Credit: Gabrielle Beans Picon

Data generation in a molecular biology lab, sampling of human specimens from clinics and data analysis in a computational lab – all these ingredients make Professor Maria Fällman’s and Senior Research Assistant Kemal Avican’s project interdisciplinary.

Collaboration and genuine interest in research taking place outside of your expertise are at the core of interdisciplinary research. Maria Fällman and Kemal Avican have been working together for a long time, aiming to uncover new targets for future antimicrobials to fight the threat of antibiotic resistance. Along the way, they established a database of stress responses of 32 clinically important human bacterial pathogens to twelve different conditions mimicking the human body.

Read more: Finding a new way to uncover targets for future antibiotics

Secret to how cholera adapts to temperature revealed

The Cava group and their international collaborators at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Harvard Medical School and Ohio State University have discovered an essential protein in cholera-causing bacteria that allows them to adapt to changes in temperature, according to a study published today in eLife.

Text by Emily Packer, Media Relations Manager, eLife

Impact statement: A protein that helps Vibrio cholerae adapt to temperature has been identified, providing insights into how bacteria change their biology under different conditions.

The protein, BipA, is conserved across bacterial species, which suggests it could hold the key to how other types of bacteria change their biology and growth to survive at suboptimal temperatures.
Vibrio cholerae (V. cholerae) is the bacteria responsible for the severe diarrhoeal disease cholera. As with other species, V. cholerae forms biofilms – communities of bacteria enclosed in a structure made up of sugars and proteins – to protect against predators and stress conditions. V. cholerae forms these biofilms both in their aquatic environment and in the human intestine. There is evidence to suggest that biofilm formation is crucial to V. cholerae’s ability to colonise in the intestine and might enhance its infectivity.

“V. cholerae experiences a wide range of temperatures, and adapting to them is not only important for survival in the environment but also for the infection process,” explains lead author Teresa del Peso Santos, a postdoctoral researcher at the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine Sweden (MIMS), Umeå University, Sweden. “We know that at 37 degrees Celsius, V. cholerae grows as rough colonies that form a biofilm. However, at lower temperatures these colonies are completely smooth. We wanted to understand how it does this.”

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Today, we celebrate women and girls in science

It is the 11th  of February, marking the International Day of Women and Girls in Science.

This day allows us to direct more attention to the still ongoing inequalities between genders in academia, andcontinue working together towards a day when gender biases and discrimination are defeated worldwide. On a global level, women in STEM positions (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) are still rare and according to the UN, only 30% of researchers are women. They publish less, get paid less and their careersalso progress slower and often not as far as for men. Scientists at MIMS were asked to fill out a survey, anonymously, on what it means for them to be a female scientist, and more than half of the participants answered that “I am a scientist, no matter which gender.”While others thought:

“It means I appreciate all female scientists that have broken down the barriers before me and given me a seat at the table. I am also aware of the work we still have to do, the mentoring of young female scientists to ensure that e.g., faculty positions become much more gender balanced.” 

“I never thought that gender played a role in being good at a certain career, but I learned that subconsciously kids can be conditioned to think that jobs are for a certain gender just because if you google 'scientist' mostly photos of men come up. If me being a female scientist can encourage a child to be one, then that's amazing.” 

Read more: Today, we celebrate women and girls in science