Christofer Sanchez officially started on 09/19/2022 as our first full-time recruit. Christofer received his bachelor’s degree from UC Riverside, where he graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in Biochemistry. He will be focusing primarily on our endocytosis project and helping with lab management. Welcome, Chris!!!

Haik has been awarded a $2.31M grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). The five-year “New Innovators Award” (DP2) will be used to study how N-glycan branching and endocytosis pathways interact to regulate receptor turnover at the plasma membrane.

More information can be found here: https://reporter.nih.gov/search/pl3Nx5CF7kmwMvcq4xfs4w/project-details/10295564

We are immediately looking for graduate students, post-docs, and/or full-time staff to work on this project. Please contact Haik at haik.m@uci.edu for more information.

Our work on N-glycosylation and T cell aging has been published in Nature Aging. In this paper we present a new explanation (altered N-glycan branching on T cells) for why the immune system weakens with age. We also show that this is driven by increased cytokine signaling (interleukin-7) and elevated levels of a normal metabolite (n-acetylglucosamine). Interestingly, this age-associated change is sex dimorphic, with a greater effect in older women than men. Correcting/reversing this change might help protect older adults from infections and cancer.

Read more here:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-022-00187-y

The Mkhikian Lab is established in the Pathology Department at UCI on March 01, 2022. We are located in rooms D468, D470 and D476 of the Medical Sciences I building.