Warren symposium follows legacy of geneticist giant

If we want to understand how the brain creates memories, and how genetic disorders distort the brain’s machinery, then the fragile X gene is an ideal place to start. That’s why the Stephen T. Warren Memorial Symposium, taking place November 28-29 at Emory, will be a significant event for those interested in neuroscience and genetics. Stephen T. Warren, 1953-2021 Warren, the founding chair of Emory’s Department of Human Genetics, led an international team that discovered Read more

Mutations in V-ATPase proton pump implicated in epilepsy syndrome

Why and how disrupting V-ATPase function leads to epilepsy, researchers are just starting to figure Read more

Tracing the start of COVID-19 in GA

At a time when COVID-19 appears to be receding in much of Georgia, it’s worth revisiting the start of the pandemic in early 2020. Emory virologist Anne Piantadosi and colleagues have a paper in Viral Evolution on the earliest SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences detected in Georgia. Analyzing relationships between those virus sequences and samples from other states and countries can give us an idea about where the first COVID-19 infections in Georgia came from. We can draw Read more

Yerkes National Primate Research Center

Reassuring news on viral immunity + HIV vaccine

A recent paper in Journal of Immunology suggests that a platform for an HIV vaccine developed by Yerkes National Primate Research Center scientists won’t run into the same problems as another HIV vaccine. Postdoc Sunil Kannanganat is the first author of the JI paper, with Emory Vaccine Center researcher Rama Amara as senior author.

Harriet Robinson, MD and Rama Rao Amara, PhD

Many HIV vaccines have been built by putting genes from HIV into the backbone of another virus. Some have used a modified cold virus (adenovirus 5). The vaccine developed at Yerkes uses modified vaccinia Ankara (MVA), a relative of smallpox and chicken pox.

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Challenges in islet transplantation

Two recent research papers from the Emory Transplant Center describe research on pancreatic islet transplantation, an experimental procedure that could help people with type I diabetes live without daily insulin injections.

Islet transplantation may offer people with type I diabetes the ability to produce their own insulin again

As with other types of transplantation, the challenge with islet transplantation is to avoid rejection of the donated organ and to balance that goal against side effects from the drugs needed to control the immune system. These papers illustrate how that balancing act is especially complex.

In the last decade, transplant specialists developed a method for islet transplantation named the “Edmonton protocol” after pioneers at the University of Alberta. While the emergence of this method was a major step forward, there are limitations:

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Adjuvants: once immunologists’ “dirty little secret”

Two presentations on Emory research at last week’s AIDS Vaccine 2010 conference concerned adjuvants. These are substances that act as amplifiers, stimulating the immune system while keeping its focus on the specific components of a vaccine.

Charlie Janeway (1943-2003)

Immunologist Charlie Janeway once described adjuvants as immunology’s “dirty little secret,” because for a long time scientists did not know how they worked. Some adjuvants can sound irritating and nasty, such as alum and oil emulsion. Alum is the only vaccine adjuvant now licensed for human clinical use in the US. Over the last few years, scientists have learned that adjuvants rev up what is now known as the “innate immune system,” so that the body knows that the vaccine is something foreign and dangerous.

Rama Rao Amara, a vaccine researcher at Emory Vaccine Center and Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and Harriet Robinson, former head of microbiology and immunology at Yerkes and now chief scientific officer at the firm GeoVax, both described extra ingredients for the DNA/MVA vaccine that Robinson designed while at Yerkes in collaboration with NIH researchers.

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What if HIV was just another virus

Imagine that HIV was a “normal” virus. An infection begins and the body responds, without getting trapped in a cycle where CD4+ T cells are consumed and the immune system is crippled.

SIV can infect sooty mangabeys but it doesn't cripple their immune systems.

The attractiveness of this idea explains some of why scientists are interested in sooty mangabeys and other non-human primates. HIV’s relative SIV can infect them, but they usually don’t develop immunodeficiency.

At last week’s AIDS Vaccine 2010 conference, Cynthia Derdeyn reported her laboratory’s recent results investigating sooty mangabeys, which don’t develop high levels of neutralizing antibodies against SIV when infected. Derdeyn’s group at Emory Vaccine Center and Yerkes National Primate Research Center studies how HIV and SIV evade the immune system.

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Reading the blood: metabolomics

In the Star Trek series, Dr. McCoy could often instantly diagnose someone’s condition with the aid of his tricorder. Medicine on 21st century Earth has not advanced quite this far, but scientists’ ideas of how to use “metabolomics” are heading in this direction.

What is metabolomics? Just as genomics means reading the DNA in a person or organism, and assessing it and comparing it to others, metabolomics takes the same approach to all the substances produced as part of the body’s metabolism: watching what happens to food, drugs and chemicals we are exposed to in the environment.

This means dealing with a huge amount of information. Human genomes may be billions of letters (base pairs) in length, but at least there are only four choices of letter!

A recent article in Chemical & Engineering News explores this concept of the “exposome” and quotes Dean Jones. He and his colleagues recently described how they can use sophisticated analytical techniques to resolve thousands of substances in human plasma. Jones is the director of the Clinical Biomarkers Laboratory at Emory University School of Medicine. The paper is in the journal Analyst, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Analytical techniques can discern more than 2500 metabolites from human plasma within 10 minutes

Using a drop of blood, within ten minutes the researchers can discern more than 2,500 substances in a reproducible way. One fascinating tidbit: when they compared the metabolic profiles for four healthy individuals, most of the “peaks” were common between individuals but 10 percent were unique.

The potential uses for this type of technology are staggering.

Jones reports he has been working with researchers at Yerkes National Primate Research Center to discern early signs of neurodegeneration in transgenic monkeys with Huntington’s disease. He has been collaborating with clinical nutrition specialist Tom Ziegler to examine how diet interacts with oxidative stress, and with lung biology to identify markers for fetal alcohol exposure in animal models.

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When your immune system calls the shots

Bali Pulendran, PhD

A tiny invader, perhaps a virus or a microbe, enters the body, and our ancient immune system responds. But how does it know what kind of invader has landed? And once it knows, how does it decide what kind of immune response it should launch?

In humans, the immune system consists of two parallel systems working with one another to fend off invaders. One is the innate immune system, the other the adaptive immune system.

Immunologist Bali Pulendran studies how those two systems work together to identify and respond to all kinds of intruders including pathogens, viruses and microbes.

It’s the innate immune system’s job to recognize the first signs of infection—that is, the moment a pathogen enters the body. “In a sense they act as smoke detectors if you will,” says Pulendran. “Little alarms.”

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