Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs
Terry Adirim, M.D., M.P.H., M.B.A., was appointed Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense and is currently serving as the Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense (ASD) for Health Affairs. As the Acting ASD, Adirim is the principal advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness for all Department of Defense health and force health protection policies, programs, and activities.
Previously, Adirim was Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs, Professor of Pediatrics and Chair of the Department of Integrated Medical Sciences at the Schmidt College of Medicine at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida. In her role as Senior Associate Dean, she was responsible for providing leadership over the College of Medicine’s clinical enterprise including providing vision, strategy and oversight of patient care, clinical translational research activities and the
Polycomb complexes found to be essential for proper skin development
Mount Sinai researchers have discovered that Polycomb complexes, groups of proteins that maintain gene expression patterns, are essential for proper skin development, according to a paper published in
Genes & Development on February 18. This latest discovery could improve development of future stem cell therapies to generate skin on a dish to transplant into burn victims and patients with skin-blistering disorders.
Polycomb complexes are groups of proteins that maintain the gene-expression patterns during early development by regulating the structure of DNA and proteins in cells. They play a critical role in the repression of gene expression, or the switching-off of individual genes to help control responses to changing environments and stimuli.
How RNAs Called SINEUPs Upregulate Translation
The recently discovered long noncoding RNAs seem to boost the production of specific proteins in the cell by interacting with RNA-binding proteins, researchers find.
Jan 1, 2021
ABOVE: A synthetic SINEUP (blue) and its target mRNA (red) colocalize in the cytoplasm as part of a process that appears to help upregulate that mRNA s translation.
NAOKO TOKI
The paper
N. Toki et al., “SINEUP long non-coding RNA acts via PTBP1 and HNRNPK to promote translational initiation assemblies,”
A few years ago, Piero Carninci of the RIKEN Center for Integrative Medical Sciences in Japan and colleagues discovered a novel type of RNA. These long, noncoding RNAs contain repetitive sequences called short interspersed nuclear elements (SINEs), and they upregulate the translation of specific mRNAs with complementary base sequences. Carninci and colleagues called the RNAs SINEUPs.
By Junji Nishihata
In recent years, the concept of ‘trained immunity’ has emerged as a new area of interest. This refers to the body’s inherent ability to reprogram the innate immune cells to respond differently to subsequent infections. Where does this recall come from? And what are the epigenetic mechanisms that enable it to persist? Indeed, the pursuit of answering the questions raised by trained immunity have been hampered by a lack of useable tools to facilitate research.
The Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences’ Professor David Langlais will be pursuing this study thanks to a grant from a new collaboration between the Canadian and Japanese research communities. The novel program is a partnership of the Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). Aimed at early-career researchers such as Langlais, the collaborative research to be supported by the AMED and CIHR builds upon a far-reaching cooperation