Daily Lobo new mexico
wednesday December 3, 2014 | Volume 119 | Issue 74
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
SFRB lowers proposed fee hike By Sayyed Shah
Kanan Mammadli / Daily Lobo / @KenanMammadly
UNM second year graduate student Xuechen Zhu works on natural product enzyme expression in Clark Hall on Tuesday. The lab of Assistant Professor Dr. Charles Melancon has engineered a potential new screening process for the characterization of antibacterial drugs.
New system streamlines drug testing Professor and graduate student’s screening process unlike any other By Lauren Topper The term “natural product” might sound more likely to be associated with a new organic diet or retail fad, but to scientists it is a term corresponding to clinically prescribed drugs used for decades. Representing many past and present medicines used to fight infections, some natural products are nature-made antibiotics. The trick is finding them. In the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, the lab of Assistant Professor Dr. Charles Melancon has engineered a potential new screening process for the characterization of these anti-bacterial drugs. The type of natural products Melancon and his team study are small molecules produced, as their name suggests, naturally by certain microbes. Many, such as erythromycin and tetracycline,
evolved to serve as chemical weapons against predators and/ or competing organisms, making them effective antibiotics. “Nature gives us much more than we know,” said Xuechen Zhu, a graduate student in Melancon’s lab. “Approximately 65 percent of all drugs are natural products and their derivatives.” Scientists are constantly screening and testing natural products to find new drugs to replace old ones to which bacterial strains have become resistant. “The process, however, can be arduous and extremely timeconsuming,” Melancon said. In an effort to streamline this process, Melancon and one of his graduate students, Shijie Huang, developed a way to examine several important steps of the natural product characterization process, such as efficacy, potency and function all in a matter of hours, he said.
“[It started as] one of these kind of harebrained ideas that I had no idea if it was going to work,” Melancon said. “What we’ve done is we’ve made a highly engineered E. coli strain that is capable of sensing a particular class of natural products and outputting a fluorescent signal when they are present.” In this method, the natural product being tested is simply mixed in with the mutant E. coli and incubated overnight. He said an effective drug would cause the bacteria to glow bright green, while the dose at which this occurs gives information on both the potency and the mechanism by which it works. “At the outset when we built it we were not sure how good it was going to be, but what we hoped for, and actually it looks like it is true, is that the intensity of the fluorescent signal correlates with
the potency of the compound,” Melancon said. The result is a completely novel method for screening certain antibiotics. “No one else in the world has developed a system quite like this,” he said. The system works by harnessing the normal actions of the natural products, Melancon explained. “When a cell divides, a molecular machine known as the ribosome is responsible for reading the genome and using it to make copies of all the proteins in that cell, so that each new cell will have a complete set. More than 50 percent of anti-bacterial drugs work by inhibiting the ribosome, which is why most antibiotics only work in dividing cells,” he said.
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Drugs page 2
After consultation with the Strategic Budget Leadership Team, the Student Fee Review Board made its final recommendations on Monday for the use of student activities fees for fiscal year 2016. The SFRB has recommended an overall increase to student activity fees of 2.45 percent for the financial year 2016. In the initial recommendations the board had recommended an increase of 5.29 percent from last year’s fee amount. “We brought our preliminary recommendations forward and they have presented a couple of concerns. They thought that we could bring our percentage increase down and that is what they asked us to do,” said Rachel Williams, Associated Students of UNM president and chair for Student Fee Review Board. SFRB has recommended increases in the budget of seven departments, clubs, organizations and projects. The organizations, clubs or departments that have been recommended for an increase in funds include: New Mexico Union (Student Union Building), University Libraries, Information Technologies, Center for Academic Programs and Support, UNM Public Events (Popejoy Hall), Women’s Resource Center and Community Engagement Center. According to the final recommendations document, applications from the Accessibility Resource Center, Sustainability Services/Green Fund, Student Patrol and an unnamed project proposed by The Dean of Students Office were not recommended for further funding due to different reasons. SFRB has also made a couple of other changes, Williams said. “They highlighted questions that they had about some of our recommendations. All the first-time applicants that SFRB recommended funding for, we
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SFRB page 2
Photo exhibit shows impact of indutrial waste By Marielle Dent
The last segment of this semester’s “Meeting of the Minds” art conversation series is centered on photographer David Maisel’s Black Maps collection and will be held on Thursday at noon in the UNM Art Museum. “David Maisel/Black Maps:
American Landscape and the Apocalyptic Sublime” is a solo exhibit surveying four chapters of Maisel’s larger Black Maps series, according to the Art Museum website. The photographs are aerial shots of remote landscapes in the American West impacted by industrial waste, mining and
urban sprawl, according to the statement. “Every semester we bring in speakers to speak about the exhibitions we have on display and they are like conversations, they are not really lectures,” said Daniel Linver, coordinator of events, membership and visitor services at the Art Museum. “They’re
meant to generate conversation about different pieces in the exhibition. We bring in sometimes professors, professionals or other people in the community to discuss what’s on display.” This Black Maps presentation also includes a selection of Maisel’s early toned gelatin silver prints of open-pit mines from the
1980s, according to a press release. “Maisel’s mineral-based, painterly color prints transform poisonous human-altered landscapes into subjects and objects of extreme beauty while simultaneously unveiling the magnitude of hidden ecological devastation that
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Black Map page 2