Associate Professor of Biomedical Sciences Yi Zhou is one of the co-authors of a paper accepted for publication in The Journal of Biological Chemistry. The paper is "14-3-3τ Promotes Surface Expression of Cav2.2(α1B) Ca2+ Channels." Corresponding author Yong Li and the nine other co-authors are all from the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in China.

Three faculty members from the Florida State University College of Medicine will lead a public discussion of the influenza virus the evening of Feb. 9. Topics will include the biology of the virus, its treatment and its prevention. A question-and-answer session also will take place. The discussion is free and open to the public.

Speakers include:

• Claudia Blackburn, MPH, RNC, CPM, health officer from the Florida Department of Health and assistant professor in the medical school’s Department of Behavioral Sciences and Social Medicine.
• Ricardo Gonzalez-Rothi, M.D., professor and chair, Department of Clinical Sciences.
• David Meckes, Ph.D., assistant professor, Department of Biomedical Sciences.

If you’re planning to attend the FSU College of Medicine’s Summer Institute, don’t delay: The application deadline is March 5.

The Summer Institute is a one-week residential program on the campus of Florida State University designed for students who are committed to pursuing a career in the medical field.

Among other things, the program:

• Motivates students to excel academically.
• Introduces students to a variety of clinical settings.
• Provides standardized test preparation for ACT and SAT.
• Provides information about scholarships and university mentoring programs.
• Exposes students to college life.
• Gives students a perspective on the life of a medical student.
• Exposes students to certain aspects of the medical school curriculum through interaction with faculty and participation in faculty-led presentations about medical topics.
• And inspires students to pursue careers in health-care professions.

For details, visit the Summer Institute web page.
 

Less than a year after finishing her undergraduate degree and winning a McKnight Fellowship, first-year biomedical doctoral student Connie Tenorio is winning again. This time, for art.

Tenorio took part in the annual ‘Art in STEM Research’ exhibit, where photographs taken by FSU students in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields who successfully capture the artistic beauty of scientific research in digital images, are displayed in the Dirac Science Library. The artistic scientist with the winning image is awarded a $50 prize.

A graduate student in the Blaber lab, Tenorio won for her "X-ray crystal structure of a designed ‘pre-biotic’ protein," which she worked on with fellow graduate student Liam Longo. Her background helped. Tenorio studied the history of art during her undergraduate career and has a strong appreciation for the art of science.

"Creativity is integral to a successful career in science," said Tenorio. "Finding the beauty in your own scientific research is one of the many joys in this line of work. The Art in STEM Research exhibit was an outreach event geared toward getting undergraduates interested in science, not by the usual technical description of research, but by using images of what each person finds beautiful about their science.

"The image Liam and I submitted is the crystal structure of one of the proteins we work on in our lab called PV2. It was obtained using X-ray crystallography, a technique used to visualize the structure of biopolymers, such as proteins. This particular protein adopts a beta-trefoil fold, which is characterized by its symmetric structure. In the center of this crystal structure is another symmetric molecule, Tris, which is used to regulate pH during crystallization conditions. Tris highlights and compliments the symmetry of PV2. A component of beauty has always been symmetry, which is all around us in nature. In fact one third of all proteins are symmetric.

"Importantly, PV2 is comprised predominately of molecular building blocks that were present on the early Earth, before the emergence of life. These molecular building blocks, called amino acids, can be generated by lightning, in hydrothermal vents, or delivered by meteorites. The fact that we were able to create a beta-trefoil using only the “old” amino acids, suggests that the chemical information on the early earth—even before the advent of life itself—was sufficient to create useful molecular tools that are still used by living organisms."

First-year students Kathryn Barbon and Alexia Loyless recently had dinner with a physician-intern who was 5,000 miles from home – and who made quite an impression on them.

Kateryna Telehina (pictured right), who visited the College of Medicine in February, is finishing her medical training in a small town near Kiev, while pursuing a
graduate degree in public health and lobbying the Ukrainian parliament for health-care reform. But she must be innovative with the resources available to her.

“They’re lacking in equipment for training both for education and health-care delivery,” said Senior Associate Dean Myra Hurt, who joined them at the dinner. “They have great needs. Kateryna said they have a lot of people in the practice of health care, but they don’t have the latest cutting-edge equipment and medicines.”

Telehina, 24, was accepted for an exchange program for post-Soviet countries through the Open World Leadership Center. She was among seven delegates pursuing health-care reform in Ukraine accepted for the U.S. trip, with stops in Washington, D.C., and Tallahassee. Their FSU activities were arranged by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), whose Friendship Force International volunteers hosted the delegates. Telehina has traveled to several European countries and the United Arab Emirates, but this was her first experience in the States.

“She was talking to us about her visit to the college the entire time,” said Barbon. “She kept saying, ‘You guys are so lucky.’ It made me really grateful for being able to go to school here.”

The students and Hurt observed Telehina’s repeated observations about technological disparities.

“We have the idea that people over there have universal health care,” said Hurt, “but the care is different from what we have. I think they have a lot of people that are trained in the finer arts – listening and the healing arts – but they don’t necessarily have all the technology that we have.”

While appreciative of technology, Loyless also saw the advantages of Telehina’s training.

“They’re more trained with their ears and their hands and their eyes,” said Loyless. “They’re very intuitive in that way. Kateryna said they don’t have the manikins to hear heart murmurs, so they have to figure it out on their own. It benefits her.”

They also noticed what Telehina did not talk about.

“Ukraine is a place that I read about every day in the newspaper that has this horrible sectarian violence going on, and the Russians are taking advantage of that,” said Hurt. “And here’s this young woman who works in a little town delivering health care near Kiev. That disconnect between knowing what was going on in her country, and this very normal person who cares a lot about her profession, struck me. I was kind of awed.”

Joedrecka Brown Speights is the principal investigator on a two-year project designed to enhance mentorship opportunities and diversity within the national Society of Teachers of Family Medicine.

The group’s executive committee awarded the “Quality Mentorship Through STFM” project $20,000 over two years.

As proposed by the STFM groups on minority and multicultural health and Latino faculty, the project has these long-term goals:

• Enhance mentorship opportunities of excellence for STFM members.
• Improve resiliency and retention of underrepresented-in-medicine-minority family medicine faculty members.
• And increase educational and leadership diversity for the STFM.

Brown is an associate professor in the College of Medicine’s Department of Family Medicine and Rural Health. She has three co-investigators on this project: Judy Washington, M.D., of New Jersey Institute of Technology, Student Health Services; Evelyn Figueroa, M.D., program director, Family Medicine Residency at University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine; and Edgar Figueroa, M.D., MPH, Student Health Services at Weill Cornell Medical College.

Additional investigators are Y. Monique Davis-Smith, M.D., program director, Navicent Health Family Medicine Residency, and Manuel Idrogo, M.D., Family Medicine and Community Health at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine.
 

For the second time in two months, a paper from Associate Professor Daniel Kaplan’s lab is being published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry.

The latest paper, “Dpb11 helps controls assembly of the Cdc45-Mcm2-7-GINS replication fork helicase,” was first published online Feb. 6. It is tentatively scheduled for print publication in April.

Kaplan, in the Department of Biomedical Sciences, said the paper was mostly the work of Nalini Dhingra, a Vanderbilt graduate student who is studying here at the College of Medicine. Kaplan was an assistant professor at Vanderbilt before he came to Florida State.

Among the co-authors of the paper is Irina Bruck, an assistant scholar scientist in Kaplan’s lab. Bruck was Kaplan’s co-author on another recent paper, “The Dbf4-Cdc7 Kinase Promotes Mcm2-7 Ring Opening to Allow for Single-stranded DNA Extrusion and Helicase Assembly.” It was first published online in Biological Chemistry on Dec. 3, then appeared in print Jan. 9.
 

Dennis Tsilimingras, former director of the Center on Patient Safety at the College of Medicine, recently published results of a study he undertook at Florida State with the help of a $900,000 grant from the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Working with the Tallahassee Memorial Hospitalist Group, Tsilimingras monitored approximately 600 patients - about half of them from rural areas - for three weeks after they were discharged from the hospital. The goal was to evaluate how safe the health-care system is for patients transitioning from hospital to home, and to see if being from a rural area had any effect on those outcomes.

"Post-Discharge adverse events among urban and rural patients of an urban community hospital: a prospective cohort study," was published by the Journal of General Internal Medicine online.  College of Medicine faculty who served as co-authors include John Agens (Department of Geriatrics), Stephen Quintero (Family Medicine and Rural Health) and Gail Bellamy (director of the Center for Rural Health Research and Policy).

"This was the first comprehensive study of post-discharge adverse events that included rural patients," Tsilimingras said. "Surprisingly, there were no differences in the incidence of post-discharge adverse events between urban and rural patients, but adverse events in urban patients were associated with hypertension, Type 2 diabetes mellitus, and secondary discharge diagnoses."

Link to the published article [pdf}

The Escher Fund for Autism is funding Pradeep Bhide's project on "Transgenerational Effects of Nicotine Exposure." 

Bhide, Ph.D., is the College of Medicine's Rodgers Chair Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and director of the Center for Brain Repair. This is a one-year, $5,000 project.

On its website, www.germlineexposures.org/about-us.html, the Escher Fund explains that its primary work is to address this core message: "All humans start life as fragile and vulnerable mega-molecules called chromatin. Molecular disruption of chromatin through induced epigenetic or other means can lead to enduring impacts on development."