The 2016 Biochemistry @ Iowa newsletter is hot off the presses and available for download. Alumni and friends should receive a hard copy in the mail this week. If you would like to be added to our mailing list, please send your contact information to biochem@uiowa.edu. While you are at it, feel free to send us your news and updates! Previous newsletters are also available online.
Dr. Larry Gray, postdoctoral fellow in the Taylor Lab, received the first place $750 travel award in the recent Pappajohn Biomedical Institute (PBI) competition for best postdoctoral fellow paper of 2015. Dr. Gray’s paper entitled “Hepatic Mitochondrial Pyruvate Carrier 1 Is Required for Efficient Regulation of Gluconeogenesis and Whole-Body Glucose Homeostasis” was published in the October 6th issue of Cell Metabolism. Dr. Gray’s research demonstrates that disrupting mitochondrial pyruvate uptake in the liver attenuates high blood sugar in models of type 2 diabetes.
The Taylor laboratory has recently published an article entitled “Hepatic Mitochondrial Pyruvate Carrier 1 Is Required for Efficient Regulation of Gluconeogenesis and Whole-Body Glucose Homeostasis” in Cell Metabolism. Postdoctoral Fellow Larry Gray was first author of this work.
Gray et al. show that the Mitochondrial Pyruvate Carrier (MPC), is critical for controlling glucose production in the liver and could potentially be a new target for drugs to treat diabetes. Dr. Taylor is quoted in UI News The Loop, “Essentially, we found that disruption of the MPC makes the liver less efficient at making glucose and, as a result, the liver burns more fat for energy, makes less cholesterol, and makes less glucose in models of diabetes.” He continued, “This overall change in metabolism matches outcomes that would be therapeutically desirable for people with diabetes.” Read the full feature on their article here.
Congratulations to Larry Gray, a postdoc in the Taylor lab, who has just received fellowship funding from the Iowa Cardiovascular Center. Larry will be studying how the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier is regulated during diabetes. Funding for his project comes from the Cardiovascular Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, a training grant under the direction of Dr. Francois Abboud (Internal Medicine), which has been continuously funded since 1975.
Lawrence Gray, who recently completed his PhD with Sharam Khademi, has been named the winner of the 2012 Subramanian Award for best PhD thesis in the Department of Biochemistry. Larry is currently pursuing post-doctoral studies with Dr. Eric Taylor.
Larry is the 19th winner of the Subramanian Award, which is made possible by a gift from Dr. Alap Subramanian, a 1964 PhD from the department, who parlayed his training with the late George Kalnitsky, (and with Irving Klotz at Northwestern and both Bernard Davis and Herman Kalckar at Harvard Medical School), into a highly successful career at the Max-Planck-Institut. Our deepest thanks to Dr. Subramanian and our heartiest congratulations to Dr. Gray.