Research in the Wollmuth lab continues to address molecular and biophysical mechanisms underlying fast synaptic transmission in the nervous system, focusing specifically on those synapses that use glutamate as a neurotransmitter.  The big news over the past year was the starting of a new RO1 entitled ‘Gating and permeation in ionotropic glutamate receptors’.  Johansen Amin and Kelvin Chan, MSTP students, joined the lab.  Undergraduates Matthew Alsaloum (Biochemistry) and Joel Thomas (Pharmacology) completed honors thesis in the Spring, 2015.  Matthew is presently in the M.D./Ph.D. program at Yale medical school.  Aaron Gochman, a new undergraduate in the lab, was awarded a URECA summer fellowship for the summer of 2015.  Graduate students/fellows in the lab presented posters at the Society for Neuroscience (Quan Gan, Catherine Salussolia) and Biophysical Society (Johansen Amin) meetings.  I gave invited seminars at the Hartman Center Symposium on Parkinson’s Research at Stony Brook, in the Dept. of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Columbia University, and at the Ion Channel meeting at the Telluride Research Center in Telluride, Colorado.

Erwin presented seminars in 2015 at the Medical College of Wisconsin, Marquette University, Dept. of Chemistry, and a talk at the workshop on “Sphingolipids in Infection and Beyond” in Würzburg, Germany.   He is Principal Investigator on a new NIH grant “Defining Principles and Functions of Membrane Organization Using Asymmetric Vesicles” that started in 2015.  A 2015 article with co-author former Ph.D. student Qingqing Lin “Ordered Raft Domains Induced by Outer Leaflet Sphingomyelin in Cholesterol-Rich Asymmetric Vesicles” Biophys. J., 108, 2212-2022 was discussed as a “New and Notable” article in the Biophysical Journal (May 5, 2015).  Erwin continues to serve as the Director of the Biochemistry and Structural Biology Graduate Program, as a member of the Editorial Advisory Board for the journal Biochemistry. He also continues to be a member of the Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Committee for the Life Sciences Research Foundation. Lab members at the end of 2015 included postdoctoral scientist Guangtao Li, Ph.D. students JiHyun Kim, James LeBarron, Johnna St. Clair, Zhen Huang and Qing Wang, and undergraduates Sade Seidu and Silvia Salamone.

Aaron Neiman spent part of the academic year on sabbatical at the Pasteur Institute in Paris.  There he worked on expanding the scope of his laboratory’s study of cell wall development in fungi by learning to work with the pathogenic fungus Aspergillus fumigatus.  Aaron presented his lab’s work in seminars at the Institute Jacques Monod, the University of Groningen, and the University of Toronto.  He also spoke at international meetings on the Fungal Cell Wall and on Neuroacanthocytosis.  In addition to the studies of cell wall assembly, current projects in the lab include the regulation of RNA localization in controlling the developmental timing of gene expression and how defects in a membrane contact site protein leads to neurodegenerative disease in humans.  The people performing these studies are a research scientist, Jae-Sook Park, three graduate students, Reuben Hoffman, Liang Jin, and Sai Zhou, a Master’s student, Patrick Singer, and the lab technician, Kai Zhang.

Professor Dale Deutsch received the International Cannabinoid Research Society (ICRS) Lifetime Achievement Award at a Symposium held in Nova Scotia this summer.The Career Award is given to a senior individual who has dedicated his or her career to furthering cannabinoid and endocannabinoid research. A record of enduring high-impact publications, awards, and committee membership exemplify such dedication. Awardees are expected to have had broad impact on more than one aspect of the field. This award is given at the annual ICRS Symposium on the Cannabinoids

Dale has been active in the ICRS since its inception in 1992 and has made numerous contributions to the field of endocannabinoid biology. His laboratory identified the enzyme that breaks down the body’s own marijuana-like substance called anandamide, and characterized the first inhibitors of this enzyme called FAAH. A new generation of these inhibitors are now being studied in human clinical trials. He established that anandamide uptake into cells is driven by FAAH activity and demonstrated with collaborators that the enzyme called NAPE-PLD was responsible for anandamide biosynthesis. His laboratory recently elucidated mechanisms by which intracellular transporters carry anandamide to FAAH for catabolism and also showed that these transporters, called fatty acid binding proteins, are carriers for THC and CBD, components of marijuana. Currently he and collaborators are designing drugs that target the transporter and raise anandamide levels.

In addition to his scientific accomplishments, Dale served as the International Cannabinoid Research Society newsletter editor for approximately 10 years and has also served as the President of this society.

Dale is in the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology. He was born in the USA and received his B.A. from the University of Buffalo in Chemistry and his PhD from Purdue University in Biochemistry specializing in enzymology. His postdoctoral research took him from the University of Colorado, to the University of Chicago and finally to Stony Brook University. He joined the Department of Pathology at Stony Brook in 1982 and joined Biochemistry and Cell Biology in 1988 where he has continued to direct the major undergraduate biochemistry teaching laboratory. He was a visiting professor at Tokushima University in Japan and at Scripps in La Jolla, CA and is currently on sabbatical in San Francisco. He has been the recipient of research grants since the early 1980s and recently was the PI on a 5 year 3.5 million dollar NIH grant to study anandamide transport inhibitors.

Vitaly Citovsky received the F1000 Outstanding Faculty Member of the Year Award. Vitaly continues to be funded by NIH/NIGMS, NSF, USDA/NIFA, US-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD), and US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). Vitaly joined the Editorial Board of PLOS ONE and he continues to serve on Editorial Boards of Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group), Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications (BBRC), F1000 Research, Virology, Plant Physiology, Frontiers in Plant-Microbe Interactions (Nature Publishing Group), Plant Signaling & Behavior, Communicative and Integrative Biology, and Gene Regulation and Systems Biology, and is a member of the Cell Biology section of Faculty 1000 Biology. Vitaly participated in the NSF Strategic Workshop On Plant Transformation & Genome Editing. Vitaly served on the Science and Technology Steering Committee for the BNL Board of Directors, the Graduate Council Fellowships and Awards Committee, the Departmental Awards Committee, and the Undergraduate Biology Curriculum Committee. Vitaly also has accepted a US-Israel Binational Agricultural Research and Development Fund (BARD) Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. H. Hak, for training.

Since the last newsletter, Professor Nancy Hollingsworth has presented seminars at Amherst College in Massachusetts, in the SBU/CSHL/BNL Evolutionary Functional Genomics Seminar Series, and at the Donnelly Center at the University of Toronto. She was an invited speaker for a scientific symposium held in celebration of Doug Koshland’s 60^th birthday at UC Berkeley, and attended the 30^th year Pew Scholars Reunion Meeting in Grand Cayman.  Nancy continues to serve as a regular member on the Cell Lineage and Differentiation study section for the March of Dimes and has been an ad hoc member for two NIH MIRA study sections, as well as a member of a National Cancer Institute site visit panel to the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology.  In December, Nancy completed an eight-year term as Associate Editor for GENETICS.  Nancy was received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and was promoted to the rank of SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor.  There have been many happy outcomes for former members of Nancy’s lab.  Tracy Callender, who was both a graduate student and IRACDA post-doctoral scientist in the Hollingsworth lab, started a position in Fall 2015 as an Assistant Professor at the C.W Post campus at Long Island University.  Nancy’s first graduate student, Hengyao Niu, has started his own lab as an Assistant Professor at Indiana University.  Two former undergraduates, David Chen and Saif Laljee, were both SBU valedictorians and have started medical school at Mt. Sinai and NYU, respectively.  Matt Murrary completed his Master’s in Biochemistry and Cell Biology.  Nancy’s lab currently consists of Evelyn Prugar (PhD student), Ray Suhandynata (PhD student), Xiangyu Chen (Research scientist), Lihong Wan (Research scientist), Dimitri Joseph (Master’s student) and Cameron Burnett (Research Technician).