A lot has happened over the summer…

– Owen Smith passed his qualifying exam, so is now free to spend the next [insert random number between 3 and 10] years completing his PhD studies in the Biochemistry program.

– Our paper on TPP-conjugated nitrolinoleate came out online in Br. J. Pharmacol. This will be part of a special edition on mitochondrial drug targeting in the cardiovascular system, out soon.

– This month (September) have a visiting grad’ student (Rebecca Parodi-Rullan) from Sabzali Javadov’s lab at University of Puerto Rico. Rebecca is here on an SFRBM mini fellowship learning mouse heart perfusion and in-vivo surgery techniques.

– We also have Marcin Karcz, resident in the Department of Anesthesiology, completing some of the research component of his residency this fall.

– Jimmy Zhang (MD/PhD student) completed his rotation project on drug screening in primary mouse cardiomyocytes, so now we’re plowing through reams of data!

– Our joint-PI RO1 with Keith Nerkhe, on mitochondrial K+ channels (renewal of GM-087483) received a decent score at study section, so now we have to wait and see if it will get funded.

– Our minus 80 blew up and had to be replaced (goodbye slush-fund).

Here is the PDF of Sergiy’s poster presentation from the American heart Association’s Basic Cardiovascular Sciences Meeting.

Summer is finally here (although we’re predicted to have overnight frost this weekend, just in time to kill all the new plants).  Anyway, some recent updates from the lab’ and elsewhere…

PeerJ is now on PubMed, which means our paper is now listed!

If anyone knows how to fix a fatal error #323 on a Spectramax Gemini plate reader (tray is not positioning correctly, so it shoots a lamp-failure error), please let me know. We tried a new lamp and that didn’t work.

Apparently NIH director Francis Collins is requesting researchers to post their personal experiences of the impact of the federal budget sequester on Twitter.  Please keep it civil.

URMC is dropping server access for IMAP and POP3 this month, which sucks if you use a desktop email client that doesn’t support Outlook protocols.  I found a workaround called DavMail, and wrote a guide to implementing it here.

Our AJP Heart paper on mitochondrial KATP channels is now out.

Paul & Sergiy will be headed to the AHA BCVS meeting in July.

And lastly, congrat’s to our colleague Jola Skalska, who will be taking up a faculty position at Alfred University this fall.

After quite possibly the worst set of peer review problems in recent memory, beginning last July, including rejection from 3 separate journals (in one case after 4 months and 2 rounds of review), our “paper from hell” is finally out in PeerJ.

It’s a neat story in which we show that the cardioprotective drugs NS1619 and NS11021, which were always thought to work via a Slo1 BK channel inside cardiac myocyte mitochondria, are instead protecting via activation of a Slo1 channel in intrinsic cardiac neurons.  This opens up a whole new area for cardioprotection – namely the idea that saving the cardiac neurons can protect the myocytes against ischemic injury.

The PeerJ thing is pretty cool too – for those who don’t know, it’s a brand-new open acces journal, founded along the same lines as PLoS, but instead of a ridiculous $1500 fee, you join as a lifetime member for $100 and just publish away. All-told, my lab’ has spent ~$8000 on publication fees in the past year, so this new approach is VERY welcome!

Our paper on mitochondrial complex II, and how it is mechanistically linked with the mitochondrial ATP-sensitive potassium channel, is now out (here) as part of an upcoming BBA special issue on complex II.  Personally, I think Figure 4 is a work of art.