Top Poster Awarded to Amanda Lanza at Metabolic Engineering Conference
Graduate student Amanda Lanza recently won Top Overall Poster in the Student/ Young Investigator Poster Award Competition sponsored by the journal Metabolic Engineering at the Metabolic Engineering IX Conference in Biarritz, France.
Lanza’s poster, A quantitative, graded dominant mutant approach for probing protein function and gene regulation, won the honor out of 213 submissions and earned a $1,000 prize, presented by Metabolic Engineering Journal Editor in Chief Greg Stephanopoulos.
“Multifunctional proteins play crucial roles in gene regulation and expression, an understanding of which is important for treating genetic diseases including cancers and many age related diseases,” said Lanza.
“This research has resulted in a new and more accurate graded dominant mutant approach to studying multifunctional proteins and their involvement in epigenetics and metabolic pathways. This graded dominant mutant approach was demonstrated as a proof of concept using an acetyltransferase protein in yeast and can be extended to other protein classes and cell types.”
Professor Hal Alper, Lanza’s advisor, said: “Amanda’s poster described her recent results in developing a new paradigm for systems biology termed a graded dominant mutant approach. This topic and poster generated a strong interest at the conference and Amanda was often seen describing her poster to crowds of people throughout the session. The interest in this topic shows that this approach will serve as a new method to enable a system-level evaluation of multifunctional proteins in cells.”
Alper’s research team, including Lanza, recently published an article in the journal PLoS ONE relating to topics demonstrated in her poster. Alper also presented recent results from his lab during the oral presentation session where he gave a talk entitled “Synthetic control of transcription: From hybrid promoters to promoter engineering to synthetic operon design.”
The Metabolic Engineering Conference is the leading conference for sharing state-of-the-art developments and achievements made in the field of metabolic engineering. The conference hosts sessions in systems biology, synthetic biology, biochemical engineering, tools and methods, and emerging techniques, health care, biofuels, chemicals and materials, microbial and mammalian systems, and other disciplines and applications. Plenary lectures are also offered to show potential future trends. A major emphasis is placed on poster sessions which serve as a scientific market place.
Tags: age related diseases, Amanda Lanza, cancer, Department of Chemical Engineering, gene regulation, graded dominant mutant approach for probing protein function and gene regulation, Hal Alper, Metabolic Engineering IX Conference, Multifunctional proteins, poster award, poster competition, quantitative, treating genetic diseases, University of Texas at Austin