LSI unveils two centers

By Karl Leif Bates
Life Sciences Institute

Director Alan Saltiel announced the establishment of two new centers of collaboration within the multidisciplinary Life Sciences Institute (LSI) May 14 during LSI’s Grand Opening Convocation.

“Our recruiting is going well, and now is the time to begin initiatives that will really help to bring scientists together across scientific fields,” Saltiel said. “These programs are at the forefront of scientific discovery and will catalyze interactions across the campus.”

The Center for Chemical Genomics (CCG) will apply the latest high-throughput laboratory technology to the search for small molecular tools that will help researchers explore living cells.

These molecular tools will enable researchers to measure the cell’s dynamic systems in action, relatively non-invasively. CCG tools may help discover how cells communicate, how they turn genes on and off, how they release newly made proteins, or send broken parts to the trash can.

The heart of CCG will be a robotic lab capable of screening tens of thousands of candidate molecules for possible effects on cells. This will be a core collaboratory for LSI scientists and other U-M researchers.

The center will be headed by David Sherman, the John Gideon Searle Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Medicinal Chemistry (College of Pharmacy) and a research professor in LSI. Sherman’s research centers on combing through naturally occurring chemicals from marine microorganisms to find potential cancer and anti-infective drugs.

The Center for Structural Biology is a critical mass of leading researchers shedding light on the very specific shapes and forms of molecules in the living cell and studying how they interact with one another in health and disease.

The collaboratory is centered around a protein production facility and an x-ray crystallography suite. This facility also serves as a core laboratory for all U-M researchers interested in understanding the three-dimensional structure of proteins.

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