posts

Our superstar undergraduate, Shayla Ngo, won the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences Undergraduate Achievement Award. Congrats, Shayla!

Wes and Val show that a DEL can be screened in flow to discover ligands of RNA secondary structures in a completely unbiased fashion. The DEL-derived ligands then plug directly into the Disney Lab’s two-dimensional combinatorial screening workflow, wherein a chosen ligand is used to fish out by selection its cognate RNA secondary structure target via deep sequencing. From there, the paper is the usual Disney tour-de-force transcriptomic target prediction and prosecution campaign. In this case, the DEL-derived molecule binds to pri-miR-27a, inhibiting miR-27a biogenesis and restoring expression of tumor migration repressors PDCD4 and PP4C. Congrats everyone on a job well done!

Wes and Patrick show that solid-phase DELs can be used to identify antibacterial compounds in whole-cell bacterial cytotoxicity assays. They identified close relatives of ciprofloxacin, which were not originally intended to occur in the DEL. This is the first of several upcoming papers on cellular DEL technology. Congrats, Wes and Patrick!

Dr. Jaicy Vallapurackal has joined the lab as a Swiss National Science Foundation Mobility Postdoctoral Fellow! Welcome, Jaicy, and congratulations on your prestigious fellowship award!

Pharm Sci graduate students John Burdick and Amanda Nguyen join the lab. Welcome, John and Amanda!

Juan and Wes show that chiral bilayers, which form the boundaries of all cells (and many organelles), are enantioselectively permeable. Interestingly, biological membrane chirality predisposes the membrane to be permeable to biological chirality amino acids. Big congratulations, Juan and Wes!

Great news! The NIH/NIGMS will continue to support our endeavors in activity-based DEL screening under the auspices of an R35 MIRA. A major new thrust includes tackling the problem of druggability and, specifically, enabling chemical probe discovery through the use of only one assay (akin to how DNA sequencers work).

Patrick unleashes a monster of a review in the upcoming thematic issue of ACS Chemical Reviews on click chemistry. In the course of reviewing our many brilliant peers’ contributions in DEL reaction development, we also illustrate the ties between click chemistry design and DEL chemistry design.

Make that 4 zots for 2020 (which, let’s be honest, doesn’t deserve any zots at all!). Welcome, Anjali Dixit (Pharmaceutical Sciences)!

We’ve long desired to associate activity-based probes directly with library beads, but chemical synthesis was just too harsh and non-selective. Val’s probing strategy leverages hybridization to immobilize activity-based probe-oligonucleotide heteroconjugates to beads. The possibilities are endless. Big congrats, Val!