A group of UMBC students from the Biological Sciences and Chemistry Department, along with Dr. Cynthia Wagner, Biological Sciences, earned a bronze medal for their work on remediating copper from the environment at the 2015 iGEM Jamboree, held in Boston, Mass. The iGEM (international genetically engineered machine) competition, based out of MIT, focuses on, and promotes, public awareness of synthetic biology.

Please join me in congratulating our very own Tara Carpenter for her selection by the UMBC Alumni Association Board of Directors as the recipient of the 2015 Outstanding Faculty Award.   As noted by Tara's nominator Andy Gotsch (2012 UMBC Alumni), Tara's "commitment to student success beyond the classroom brings distinction to the UMBC community and warrants special recognition."   

The ceremony will take place on October 8th, 2015 in the Albin O. Kuhn Library gallery. For more information, please contact Bernadette Darby in Alumni Relations at 410-455-3703 or darbyb@umbc.edu. Light hors d’oeuvres will be served beginning at 6:30 p.m.  with a dessert reception immediately following the ceremony. Congratulations again on this prestigious honor!!

Please RSVP at the website below.

Professor Chris D. Geddes, Ph.D., FRSC, has been named a Daily Record  Innovator of the Year 2015.

Dr. Geddes, Director of UMBC's Institute of Fluorescence and a faculty member from the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry has just received the honor for his lab's recent work developing the Lyse-it™ technology, a technology that enables the rapid lysing of cells to collect their genetic material. This is the 4th time Professor Geddes has been honored by the Daily Record in the last 8 years for his lab's pioneering innovations.

Sample preparation (lysis) is key to the development of many clinical Point-of-Care (POC) and laboratory tests involving cellular genetic analysis. For example, sample preparation is a significant bottleneck in PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction)-based approaches, the gold standard in both pathogen and clinical (hospital setting) detection today, with available technologies taking many cumbersome, lengthy and costly steps. In addition, commercially available lysis kits today require different kits and protocols for different media (e.g. broth, urine, blood).

To address this bottleneck of speed, cost and complexity, and to address the fact that many laboratories employ multiple kits for routine testing, Dr. Geddes’ lab has developed Lyse-it™, a means to lyse virtually any cell, spore or virus rapidly (typically <20 seconds) in a single-step on a single platform, thereby enabling the genetic material (e.g. DNA) to be collected for downstream analysis on any platform.

Focused microwaves in small disposable sample chambers readily allow the Lyse-it™ user to lyse cellular samples with near-100% efficiency, within 20 seconds on a single platform at a cost less than other technologies available today. Importantly, this lysing approach is generic to a whole range of cells and viruses. This is because it is a single platform (one size fits all), unlike traditional lysing buffer approaches that all use multiple kits for different media.

Key members of Dr Geddes’ lab that participated in this innovation include: Johan Melendez (graduate student), Tonya Santaus (graduate student); Greg Brinsley (undergraduate); Jacob Roberts (undergraduate); Maraki Negesse (undergraduate) and Daniel Kiang (undergraduate).

The Lyse-it™ technology invented by Dr. Geddes is the technology behind his new company of the same name. Lyse-it™ is Dr. Geddes’ third company to date. Dr. Geddes currently has one patent issued and two patents pending on the Lyse-it™ technology.

Dr Geddes has recently received $100,000 from Maryland’s TEDCO and $20,000 from UMBC’s catalyst fund to push the technology forward towards commercialization. 

Sarah Zimmermann, Ph.D., a former graduate student in the Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry at UMBC, was recently awarded a Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award (NRSA) for postdoctoral research training at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Zimmermann received her Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry at UMBC in 2014 under the direction of Prof. Seley-Radtke. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Drug Discovery program, where she explores the therapeutic utility of glutaminase inhibitors for the treatment of cancer under the direction of Prof. Takashi Tsukamoto. The postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute of Health will allow Dr. Zimmermann to continue her research on this very important subject. Dr. Zimmermann received her B.S. degree from Lynchburg College. While at UMBC, she was supported by the NIH Chemistry-Biology Interface Fellowship. The Kirschstein awards are a highly selective and very prestigious source of funding for doctoral and postdoctoral trainees. The grants are awarded based on lengthy proposals submitted by applicants in which original experimental plans are described. The proposals are evaluated and given an impact score reflecting scientific merit by a study section at the Center for Scientific Review at the NIH. 

Congratulations to Sarah!

Graduate student Lauren Schoukroun-Barnes and undergraduate Ethan Glaser in the White Group publish their recent findings on heterogeneous sensor surfaces in Langmuir. The students used aptamer-based sensors achieve detection of analytes through a conformation change to develop a general method to predictably tune the sensitivity and linear range of electrochemical sensors using varying length aptamers (small single-stranded nucleic acids that fold into a well-defined three-dimensional structure). They demonstrated that mixtures of modified sequences can be used to tune the affinity, dynamic range, and sensitivity of the resulting sensors.