IN BRIEF
IN BRIEF News and highlights from across the School of Medicine
PRESERVING ASTRONAUTS’ VISION Many astronauts can experience changes in vision while traveling in space, with some changes persisting years after they have returned home. Brian Samuels, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Ophthalmology, and collaborators from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University have received a grant to study computational modeling as a method of determining why astronauts who are in space for extended periods of time experience eye problems. Samuels is collaborating with scientists at the NASA Glenn Research Center and others to help identify the cause of these pathologies and determine whether there is a way to intervene and prevent these types of vision complications in the future. “We are trying to incorporate all of the existing clinical and research data into functional computational models of the eye itself, the central nervous system, and the cardiovascular system to determine how they are interacting,” Samuels says.
THREAT Scientists from the UAB School of Medicine and the University of Notre Dame have developed a new method that enables researchers to radiolabel three forms of perfluorinated and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFASs) and track them in the body. These PFASs, which are known to be harmful to humans, have been found in fast food wrappers at many popular chain restaurants. In the newly designed method, one of the fluorine atoms on the PFAS molecule was replaced with a radioactive form of fluorine, the same radioisotope fluorine-18 that is used for medical positron emission tomography (PET) scans in hospitals. “For the first time, we have a PFAS tracer or chemical that we have tagged to see where it goes in mice,” says Suzanne Lapi, Ph.D., senior author of the study published in the Journal of Environment Science and Technology. Lapi is an associate professor in the UAB Department of Radiology and director of UAB’s Cyclotron Facility. “Each of the tracers exhibited some degree of uptake in all of the organs and tissues of interest that were tested, including the brain. The highest uptake was observed in the liver and stomach, and similar amounts were observed in the femur and lungs.” Diseases including kidney and testicular cancers, thyroid disease, low birth weight and immunotoxicity in children, and other health issues have been linked to PFASs in previous studies.
GENETIC CLUES TO KIDNEY DISEASE UAB researchers have identified two genes, C1GALT1 and C1GALT1C1, which contribute to the chronic kidney disease IgA nephropathy. This provides new genetic clues to understanding IgA nephropathy, an autoimmune kidney disease that commonly causes kidney failure. The findings are relevant to IgA nephropathy and other diseases with similar underlying molecular defects, such as inflammatory bowel disease, certain types of blood disease, and cancer. The study, conducted by researchers at Columbia University and the UAB School of Medicine, was published in PLOS Genetics. The genes that were identified are involved in attaching a certain sugar to proteins, including lgA1 in a process called O-glycosylation.
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UAB Medicine | Summer 2017