Department of Biological Sciences faculty member, Dr. Jayasri Das Sarma, has recently published an exciting work with her student Dr. Kaushiki Biswas which appeared in the recent edition of Journal of Virology [Biswas K, Das Sarma J. (2014) Effect of microtubule disruption on neuronal spread and replication of demyelinating and nondemyelinating strains of mouse hepatitis virus in vitro. J Virol.  88(5):3043-7]. In this paper they show the involvement of microtubules in the transport of demyelinating but not non-demyelinating strains of coronavirus. The significance of the study is the observation that strains of virus that differ only in proteins important for attachment to host cells have profound differences in their ability to cause myelin destruction. This study explains why only some strains of neurotropic viruses cause demyelination. In addition to increasing our understanding of virus-induced demyelination and axonal loss, it identifies a potential therapeutic target in patients with the human demyelinating disease, multiple sclerosis.commercial jumping castles to buy

Jibin Sadasivan, our fourth year Integrated BS MS student pursuing Neuroscience project under the guidance of Dr. Jayasri Das Sarma is the recipient of the 2014 Du Pré award. This prestigious research grant is awarded by the Multiple Sclerosis International Federation (MSIF) to young researchers from emerging countries to enable them to undertake short visits to established multiple sclerosis research centers, either to learn more from each other or to carry out parts of joint research projects. JIbin will use his £5000 grant to travel to the University of Colorado, Denver, USA to work with DrRandell J Cohrs, on the dynamic regulation of host immune mediators in the central nervous system during mouse hepatitis virus induced acute and chronic inflammation.

For details of the award announcement follow this link

Department of Biological Sciences faculty member Partho Sarothi Ray has recently co-authored a paper in the prestigious journal Cell [Yao P., Potdar A.A., Arif A., Ray P.S., Mukhopadhyay R., Willard B., Xu Y., Yan J., Saidel G.M. and Fox, P.L. (2012) Coding region polyadenylation generates a truncated tRNA synthetase that counters translation repression. Cell 149, 88-100] which describes a new mechanism of generating new proteins by converting a stop codon into an amino acid-encoding codon by adding an alternative poly-adenine tail to an mRNA. The significance of the study lies in the fact that the discovery is based on computational modeling of a translation regulatory system which was observed to give a constant low level of translation of a protein, vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF), even when the synthesis of the protein was inhibited. This is one of the first studies which have utilized computational modeling together with experimental validation to discover a new molecular mechanism, emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of scientific discovery today.