Category: Uncategorized

Josh Reynolds has joined the group as a new graduate student. Welcome, Josh!

Purse Lab members Dana Rosansky and Sritin Ghosh are starting their year of coursework at UCSD as a part of the SDSU–UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Chemistry. It’ll be a busy year for them both! If you’re interested in being a part of this program, then find out more here.

Ani Shalamberidze, a Ph.D. student member of our team, has published a JACS paper in collaboration with the Kleiner Lab at Princeton shows that a combination of judiciously selected fluorescent nucleoside analogues with genetic upregulation of nucleoside kinase activity enables metabolic labeling and live-cell imaging of RNA biology. The method has already been used to discover previously unknown cytoplasmic RNA granules generated during oxidative stress. Great ready for more discoveries in RNA biology!

https://doi.org/10.1021/jacs.2c04142

Purse Lab Ph.D. student Ani Shalamberidze is working in collaboration with the Kleiner Lab at Princeton University on a new method for metabolic labeling and live-cell imaging of RNA. We have found that the right design of fluorescent ribonucleoside analogue combined with genetic up-regulation of the UCK2 enzyme of the pyrimidine salvage pathway enables fluorescent metabolic labeling to detect RNA synthesis, degradation, and trafficking in living cells. Check out the manuscript on bioRxiv: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.03.22.485351.

Congrats to George Samaan for his first authorship of our new publication, Single-molecule fluorescence detection of a tricyclic nucleoside analogue, just out in Chemical Science! Along with undergrads Mckenzie Wyllie and Julian Cizmic, George created this molecule, informed in part by pioneering studies from former Purse Lab undergrads Katrina Ngo and Susan Andersen. Big thanks to our British collaborators Lisa-Maria Needham, David Nobis, Steven Lee, and Steven Magennis for their awesome single-molecule fluorescence measurements. More to come. 😉

ChemistryViews, the online magazine of Chemistry Europe, has just published a highlight of Ben Turner’s new research article describing the use of fluorescent nucleotide substrate analogues for retroviral reverse transcriptases!

Check out their coverage of Ben’s research! <http://www.chemistryviews.org/details/ezine/11242991/Reverse_Transcription_Used_to_Generate_Fluorescent_DNA.html>

Dana Rosansky is joining the Purse Lab, fresh after finishing her B.A. in Biochemistry from the University of San Diego. Dana worked with Prof. Tammy Dwyer at USD on NMR studies on the structure of chemically modified DNA. Now she’s shifting her focus to design and create these DNA modifications herself! Dana’s research will focus on fluorescent modifications of DNA and RNA that will shed light (literally!) on the regulatory mechanisms that control the expression of the genetic code. Welcome, Dana!

Congratulations to Ben Turner on his new paper that’s just out in ChemPlusChem! Ben’s results show that fluorescent tricyclic cytidine analogues tC and DEAtC are substrates for retroviral reverse transcriptases. They can be used by these enzymes to synthesize fluorescently labeled double-stranded DNA from an RNA template. Further development of Ben’s methods may lead to ways to monitor the replication of retroviruses such as HIV in cell or tissue culture. Read Ben’s article here!

Congratulations to George Samaan for his 1st first-author paper, just published in Bioorg. Med. Chem. Lett.! Our new study shows that structure-guided inhibitor design can be used to prepare new 8-oxo-G analogues as GTP cyclohydrolase inhibitors with the potential to constitute a new class of antibiotics. We have some even newer designs coming. 😉

Read all about it here!

Today we published a new paper on our efforts to combat the Zika virus. Lead authors Jean Bernatchez of UCSD and Michael Coste (from the Purse Lab at SDSU) have shown that the activity of Zika inhibitors synthesized by Michael depends on the type of cell infected by the virus. Our work shows that researchers working on potential Zika cures need the pay special attention to use disease-relevant cell types when studying the potency of potential drug leads in cell-based assays.

This project is a collaboration between the Purse Lab (SDSU), the Siqueira-Neto Lab (UCSD), the Sohl Lab (SDSU), The Hecht Group (Southwestern College), and the Zhu Lab (UCSD / The Sanford Consortium for Regenerative Medicine).

Read more here!