A new study presented at the Experimental Biology 2012 conference revealed that combining proteins after workouts provides more benefits. Protein is essential for muscle growth and has become a popular addition to many exercise regimens. As a coach, I am often asked about the best nutrient supplements. Although I prefer natural sources of protein from food, there are benefits to using protein blends for some athletes.

The Right Combination of Proteins

Previous studies on protein consumption after exercise have provided conflicting information. The latest research presented at the Experimental Biology 2012 conference indicates that a combination of casein, soy and whey protein may actually be the best solution for athletes. Instead of relying on one source, adding several types of proteins helps the body build muscles faster and longer.

Researchers claim that the best combination is 50 percent casein, 25 percent soy and 25 percent whey protein. The main advantage of using all three products is to release a constant amount of amino acids for the longest period of time. Since each type of protein is digested at a different rate, using three of them provides the most benefits.

Study Limitations

Unfortunately, the sample group used by the researchers is limited in this case. They admit that the study only included 19 "young adults," so the results may not be applicable to everyone. Furthermore, age is another factor that needs to be studied in more detail because the current research only focused on young adults. The study is basing its main benefits on the continuous flow of amino acid, but metabolic rates vary greatly for individuals, and they may not see the same results.

The study is credited to Dr. Blake Rasmussen at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Since the researchers used Solae SUPRO isolated soy protein, the company has been proudly displaying the results of the study on its website. Unfortunately, the summary that has been released has a limited amount of data. I will be looking forward to the full results that Dr. Blake Rasmussen plans to reveal at the annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine.

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New Research Encourages Combining Proteins After Workouts

Newswise Bethesda, MD -- The Genetics Society of Americas (GSAs) biennial meeting, Model Organisms to Human Biology Cancer Genetics, June 17-20, 2012, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC, will bring together investigators who study cancer relevant biology in model organismssuch as fruit flies, yeast, fungi, mice and other organismswith investigators studying human cancer. Each session includes two invited speakers -- one from the model organism research community and the other focusing on human cancer research.

The program also includes a mini-symposium on ModENCODE, with presentations by Eric Green, M.D., Ph.D., Director, National Human Genome Research Institute/National Institutes of Health (NIH); Robert Waterston, M.D., Ph.D., University of Washington, Seattle; and Gary Karpen, Ph.D., Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. In addition, there will also be a speaker from the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)/NIH.

I. MEDIA REPRESENTATION -- Representatives of the media are cordially invited to attend the scientific keynotes, plenary and poster sessions. Eligible media will receive complimentary registration (see III. MEDIA PARTICIPATION below). Media may register by contacting Phyllis Edelman, pedelman@genetics-gsa.org

For hotel registration, please go to the meeting site at http://www.mohb.org.

II. SCIENTIFIC PROGRAM For the complete program and Schedule of Events, see http://www.mohb.org/2012/pages/program.shtml .

Keynote Speakers: Sunday, June 17, 2012: Bert Vogelstein, M.D., Johns Hopkins University Monday, June 18, 2012: Angelika Amon, Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (sponsored by NIGMS in celebration of their 50th anniversary) Tuesday, June 19, 2012: Eric S. Lander, Ph.D., Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Plenary Sessions: Invited Plenary Scientific Sessions will offer the opportunity to learn about the latest research in the fields listed below. In addition to the invited speakers listed below, each session will include four talks chosen from the submitted abstracts. All names listed are co-chairs and speakers.

Session 1: Understanding Tumor Genomes: A View Into the Abysso Elaine Mardis, Ph.D., Washington University o Lynda Chin, M.D., MD Anderson Cancer Center

Session 2: Cell Defects 1: Cell Proliferation and Cell Cycle Regulation o Stephen Elledge, Ph.D., Harvard University o Jacqueline Lees, Ph.D., MIT

Session 3: Cell Defects 2: Genome Stability and DNA Repair o Michael Kastan, M.D., Ph.D., Duke University o Sue Biggins, Ph.D., Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

See the rest here:
Model Organisms to Human Biology - Cancer Genetics Meeting

On the last day of Experimental Biology 2012, I had the great pleasure to be able to see the work of the Jones lab at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. I wrote about their work at last years meeting, and Im very happy to show you all the latest advances this year!

Theres very little thats more serious than a heart attack. Otherwise known as a myocardial infarction (MI), a heart attack is a loss of blood flow to the heart. When there isnt enough blood flow to the heart, the heart muscles do not receive enough oxygen, and heart cells begin to die and lose their ability to pump in rhythm.

In the past, the vast majority of people who suffered from a heart attack would die. But now advances in modern medicine have enabled many people to continue for years following MI. So we are not only concerned with survival of heart attack, we are also concerned with recovery, what can help recovery and make it faster, or reduce the severity of the heart attack in the first place.

And as Haar et al, from the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine have found, sometimes whats bad for you might not be so bad for your heart, at least, in small doses. Haar has been looking at the effects of a high-fat diet on MI outcomes in mice. She previously found that short-term high-fat diets in mice (between 24 hours and two weeks of exposure, but not longer, otherwise you get some very fat mice), produced protection during a heart attack. When she induced an experimental heart attack in mice, mice that had been treated with a high fat diet for a short period of time showed reduced damage when compared to control mice. Haar also showed that 24 hours worth of high-fat diet produces protection for about 24 hours afterward, but not 48 hours (a double cheeseburger every other day, then?).

All this is well and good, but the important question is asking how does this protection work? Haar and her colleagues hypothesize that a high-fat diet can shift the damage balance in the heart from apoptosis (cell death) to autophagy (a shifting of cellular energy resources), and they hypothesize that an important molecule involved is NF-kappaB.

NF-kappaB (nuclear factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells), is a protein complex which affects the transcription of DNA, and could have widespread effects on how cells function under stress. To examine the role of NF-kappaB in the high-fat protection from MI, Haar took a group of dominant-negative mice, animals which specifically fail to activate NF-kappaB in the heart. She fed some of them on a high-fat diet, gave them all a heart attack, and looked to see if the protective effects of the high-fat diet were still present. In the NF-kappaB dominant negative mice, the injury size following MI was larger, and the high-fat diet failed to protect the mice from the effects.

But NF-kappaB affects a lot of genes, what specifically was going on? It appears that the heart cells are not dying at the same rates in mice on a high-fat diet, Haar saw fewer markers of apoptosis in the high-fat group. To see if the cells were instead undergoing autophagy, she looked at the marker Beclin-1. Beclin-1 is a marker for autophagy, a way to show that cells are reallocating their resources to preserve function, rather than dying in response to the severe stress of the MI. And it turns out that a high-fat diet increases the expression of Beclin-1 in the damage zone of mice having a heart attack. Not only that, this increase is blunted in the dominant negative NF-kappaB mice following heart attack, showing that NF-kappaB may be controlling the increase of Beclin-1. This means that high-fat diets are shifting the balance of the heart from apoptosis to autophagy, allowing the heart to suffer less damage during heart attack.

Of course, its not a good idea to go eat a double-cheeseburger in perfect comfort. After all, people who habitually eat high fat diets are at a much greater risk for heart attack in the first place. But its an interesting look into how the heart can protect itself, and may mean new potentials for treatment in those who suffer heart attack. And maybe you dont have to feel quite so guilty about the high-fat food, if you only have it once in a while.

The rest is here:
Experimental Biology Blogging: Every once in a while, a double cheeseburger might not be so bad for the heart.

Its day 4 of the Experimental Biology meeting, and I looked at a poster using zebrafish as a model for behavioral effects of hallucinogens, but there was also a great symposium on treatments for affective disorders, as well as great posters on stress, serotonin systems, and more. But well stick with the zebrafish for now.

When most scientists think of how we might study drug response, we usually think of rats or monkeys or mice, pressing levers to deliver drug, or showing different behaviors in response to treatments. Sometimes we will see studies on flies (http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2012/03/a-lack-of-sex-drives-flies-to-drink.ars). But what about fish? Specifically, zebrafish?

Zebrafish are a pretty attractive model for scientific research. They have a completely sequenced genome, a series of easily observed and modified behaviors, and they are cheap(er) than rodent or primate models. And its easy enough to test the effects of different drugs: just pour some into the tank and watch what happens, a much less stressful form of administration than having to inject a mammal.

There are already studies out there in zebrafish using cocaine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18499199) and morphine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22205946). Allan Kalueffs lab at Tulane University is interested in hallucinogens, drugs like that mescaline and psilocybin. In particular they looked at mescaline, a drug derived from the peyote cactus, psilocybin, a drug derived from mushrooms, and phencyclidine (PCP), a drug that was once developed as an anesthetic, but has powerful hallucinogenic properties. Mescaline and psilocybin act at receptors for the neurotransmitter serotonin (http://scientopia.org/blogs/scicurious/2010/08/25/back-to-basics-3-depression-post-4-the-serotonin-system/), and PCP has its mechanism of action via the glutamate system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phencyclidine). All three of them are powerful hallucinogenic drugs. And while you cant tell if a zebrafish is seeing things, their easily classified behaviors can be used to examine similarities and differences between drugs, and help to understand their mechanisms of action.

So Collins, a student in Kalueffs laboratory, has given zebrafish various doses of hallucinogens, and looked at how the fish behave. He started with the novel tank test, where you put a single fish in a novel tank with drug or saline. When the fish are exposed to a novel tank, they immediately swim to the bottom, and start to swim to the post as they get more comfortable, a measure of anxiety-like behavior. But with PCP or mescaline, the fish swam to the top of the tank more quickly than control fish, suggesting that they had decreased anxiety. Fish on PCP also showed more erratic swimming behavior. Collins also looked at social behavior in the shoaling test. Zebrafish are social, and like to shoal together, but will show differences in social behavior in response to different drugs. When Collins gave the fish mescaline, the fish appeared to be more social, showing decreases in inter-fish distance. Psilocybin and PCP also produced increases in the stress hormone cortisol.

By looking at the effects of hallucinogenic drugs in fish behaviors , Kalueffs lab hopes to use the zebrafish as a model to understand the mechanisms behind drug-induced behaviors, and help us to understand how these very complicated drugs have their effects. Not only that, hallucinogenic drugs are often used to model psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia. So some day, zebrafish on PCP might provide the key to some complicated disorders.

Read more here:
Experimental Biology Blogging: Hallucinating Zebrafish

Public release date: 25-Apr-2012 [ | E-mail | Share ]

Contact: Tina McDowell tmcdowell@carnegiescience.edu 202-939-1120 Carnegie Institution

Washington, D.C.The American Society for Plant Biology (ASPB) awarded Wolf B. Frommer, director of Carnegie's Department of Plant Biology, the Lawrence Bogorad Award for Excellence in Plant Biology Research for "his major contributions in the development of fundamental tools and technologies essential for breakthrough discoveries that advance our understanding of glucose, sucrose, ammonium, amino acid, and nucleotide transport in plants."

Frommer joined Carnegie's Department of Plant Biology in 2003 as a staff member. Just four years later he became acting director of the department, a position that became permanent in 2009. Before coming to Carnegie, Frommer was a full professor and Chair of Plant Physiology at the Eberhard-Karls-Universitt Tbingen in Germany where he led a group of 80. He was also cofounder and director of the Center of Plant Molecular Biology in Tbingen, where he oversaw a staff of 150.

"Wolf develops novel technologies to address fundamental questions in plant science. These are a foundation for increasing the yield of crops and bolstering the world's food supply," remarked Carnegie president Richard A. Meserve. "His leadership has had an enormous impact on plant science. We are proud that his contributions have been recognized."

Frommer believes that understanding the basic mechanisms of plant life can help us solve problems in agriculture, the environment and medicine, and can even provide understanding of human disease processes. He works to solve both fundamental and real-world problems. In addition to his basic research, Frommer was founder of the biotechnology company SYMPORE GmbH, in Tbingen, and was a founder and vice president of the Joint Bioenergy Institute's Feedstocks Division, in Emeryville, CA. He was also a visiting faculty member at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories.

Among other innovations, Frommer and his team developed new so-called nano-sensors that, with advanced imaging methods, can measure metabolites in live plant and animal cells. This work helps to understand how plants distribute energy from leaves, the sites of photosynthesis, to roots and seeds.

Frommer has received two major scientific prizes, the highest German research award, the Gottfried-Wilhelm-Leibniz Prize in 1988, and the Krber Award for European Science in 2001. The latter recognized him as one of the most outstanding biologists in Europe. He is also a fellow of AAAS and has published more than 230 scientific papers. Frommer also has more than 30 patents or patent applications.

The Lawrence Bogorad Award for Excellence in Plant Biology Research was established by the ASPB in 2005 to honor Dr. Bogorad's many contributions to plant biology, including his influential efforts to bring the techniques of molecular biology to bear on problems in plant biology; his groundbreaking research on chloroplast genetics, biogenesis, structure, and function; and his inspired teaching and mentoring. The award is a made biennially to a plant scientist whose work both illuminates the present and suggests paths to enlighten the future.

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Carnegie's Wolf B. Frommer receives Bogorad Award for Excellence in Plant Biology

ALBANY, N.Y., April 26, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- AMRI (AMRI), a leading global contract research and manufacturing organization, announced today a key addition to the management team at its Singapore location. Saravanakumar Dhakshinamoorthy, Ph.D. joins AMRI's Singapore site as Director of In Vitro Biology, reporting to Takeshi Yura, Ph.D., Senior Director, AMRI Singapore. As the leader of AMRI's biology resources and staff in Singapore, Dr. Dhakshinamoorthy and his team will be working closely with on-site colleagues supporting customer projects as well as in collaboration with AMRI's U.S.-based biology and DMPK teams.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20120229/NY61160LOGO )

AMRI's Singapore Research Center provides a full complement of drug discovery services to the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry. Capabilities support the many different sciences required in the discovery and advancement of new small molecule medicines, embracing medicinal chemistry, in vitro biology and DMPK, all of which can be provided individually or together to encompass an integrated drug discovery program. The Singapore operation is capable of working on projects self contained or often in concert with AMRI's global discovery services operations in the U.S. and India. Preclinical candidates that are discovered by these efforts may be progressed by access to AMRI's global development services.

"In this newly created role, Dr. Dhakshinamoorthy (SK) brings senior-level in vitro biology expertise, a strong track record of industry experience and additional drug discovery project management experience to the Singapore site," said Dr. Yura. "Previously the Singapore biology group had been functioning as a satellite operation to AMRI's flagship biology operations in Bothell, WA and leadership and oversight of Singapore biology had been handled through Bothell. Clients will now have direct senior level access, independent of the U.S., to help tailor our biology resources to their program and lead and manage the progression of those programs all self-contained within Singapore."

SK comes to AMRI after seven years with Aurigene, a discovery services company in Bangalore, India. He previously worked in Singapore with the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. He brings more than 20 years of postgraduate experience in academic and industrial settings to AMRI.

Dr. Bruce Sargent, Senior Vice President, Drug Discovery, AMRI, said, "In vitro biology and DMPK capability has become increasingly important within AMRI's Singapore drug discovery operations, supporting a growing interest in integrated drug discovery. The group has worked closely with U.S.-based biology and DMPK leadership. This new position provides local leadership and experience which we expect to help us build additional business for the Singapore facility."

SK received his Ph.D. in Biotechnology in 1998, from the Centre for Biotechnology, Anna University, Chennai, India. His Postdoctoral research was conducted at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.

About AMRI

Albany Molecular Research, Inc. (AMRI) is a global contract research and manufacturing organization offering customers fully integrated drug discovery, development, and manufacturing services. For over 21 years AMRI has demonstrated its adaptability as the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries have undergone tremendous change in response to multiple challenges. This experience, a track record of success and locations in the United States, Europe and Asia now provides our customers with SMARTSOURCING, a full range of value-added opportunities providing customers informed decision-making, enhanced efficiency and more successful outcomes at all stages of the pipeline. AMRI has also successfully partnered R&D programs and is actively seeking to out-license its remaining programs for further development. For more information, please visit http://www.amriglobal.com.

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AMRI Hires Director of In Vitro Biology in Singapore