NEWS

We are proud to announce that Neuroscience PhD student Morgan Lambert was selected for support as a trainee on the UT Health San Antonio Neuroscience T32. This honor is a major stepping stone in the first stage of support from the NIH that can really jumpstart a scientific career.

Selective neuronal vulnerability to deficits in RNA processing Emerging evidence indicates that errors in RNA processing can causally drive neurodegeneration. Given that RNA produced from expressed genes of all cell types undergoes processing (splicing, polyadenylation, 5′ capping, etc.), the particular vulnerability of neurons to deficits in RNA processing calls for careful consideration. The activity-dependent transcriptome remodeling associated with synaptic plasticity in

Bess (and her father) helped MD/PhD student Zach Uttke and his girlfriend Melissa set up a hive!

Morgan Thomas absolutely rocked her qualifying exam! Comments from the committee included statements such as "this was one of the best QEs I've seen." Morgan is a T32-funded PhD student in the IBMS Neuroscience discipline. She is developing a split luciferase based reporter of polyglutamine aggregation in Drosophila and is studying the role of retrotransposons in microglial activation. Morgan also recently found out that she was accepted to the Summer Program in Neuroscience,

Zach Uttke is an MD/PhD student in our UT Health San Antonio MSTP program who joined the Frost lab for a summer prior to starting the program. We were particularly impressed by this poster award, as Zach has not even officially begun the PhD portion of his MD/PhD program! A quick intro to Zach's project: Throughout aging, decondensation of constitutive heterochromatin and consequent transcriptional de-repression occurs in species ranging from yeast to humans. A major function

We are pleased to announce that Morgan has accepted our offer to join the Frost lab for her PhD training! Morgan is in the Neuroscience Discipline of the Integrated BioMedical Sciences program at UT Health San Antonio. She earned her undergraduate degree in Biochemistry and Molecular biology with a minor in Neuroscience from the University of South Carolina. There she worked on detection of copper in the brain using carbon microfiber electrodes, and studied kynureninic acid i

We think that pathogenic forms of tau disrupt the cellular program that maintains terminal differentiation of neurons. We have a new publication related to this idea – this project was led by our first PhD student, Adrian Beckmann: Adrian discovered that tau-induced aberrant activation of Moesin, a crosslinker of the plasma membrane and actin cytoskeleton that is known for its role in cancer and the epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT), drives cell cycle activation and con

Annie's artwork will be featured in the upcoming edition of Connective Tissue. Connective Tissue aims to cultivate the arts and humanities at UTHSA - the editorial received 208 submissions, and Annie had TWO pieces selected for inclusion. Her drawing (below) and an original song will be featured in the 2023 edition. We are all feeling artsy by proximity.

Congratulations to Lulu on her "Best Poster Award in the Basic Science" award at the South Texas Alzheimer's Conference! Lulu presented her work on tau-induced Arc overexpression/multimerization as a driver of neurodegeneration.

We are dipping our toes into the world of nuclear mechanics 😊. Frost lab grad student Claira Sohn has discovered that pathogenic forms of tau cause an overall decrease in nuclear tension in cultured neuroblastoma cells: https://lnkd.in/gTnirPZy Claira became interested in a potential role for tau in nuclear mechanotransduction based on our previous studies showing that pathogenic forms of tau destabilize the lamin nucleoskeleton: https://lnkd.in/gVpJkyfu To quantify the effe