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A recent paper by Prof. Sam Cho and his collaborators at University of Maryland and Zhejiang University (China) was highlighted by the Journal of the American Chemical Society. In their study, they performed a novel ion-concentration coarse-grained MD simulation of the human telomerase RNA pseudoknot.

Normal cells shorten DNA after every replication cycle so that a cell knows when to die and cease replication. The telomerase enzyme that is found in cancerous cells, however, adds telomeres to the ends of DNA so that the cell avoids death. As a result, the DNA becomes unstable after too many replications, resulting in tumors that lead to cancer. Due to its importance, the discovery of the telomerase enzyme was the focus of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

Prof. Cho and his coworkers focused on the RNA pseudoknot portion of the telomerase enzyme that is known to be critical for enzyme activity. Their study provided a key molecular-resolution support for the hypothesis that there are hidden states in the RNA folding process that were suggested in previous experiments. The generality of their results indicates similar folding mechanisms for other RNA molecules.

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• Congratulations to Patricia Dos Santos, assistant professor of chemistry, whose proposal entitled “Targeting Bacillithiol and Thiol-based Redox Homeostasis in Bacillus Anthracis” has been funded by the N.C. Biotechnology Center and the WFU Health Sciences.
• Congratulations to Paul Pauca, associate professor of computer science, whose proposal entitled “Analysis of Ultrasound Signal Reconstruction” has been funded by the Boeing Company.

• Congratulations to Jacque Fetrow, Dean of Wake Forest College and Reynolds Professor of Computational Biophysics, whose proposal entitled “Integrin function in cartilage” has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and WFU Health Sciences.
• Congratulations to Steve Messier, professor of Health & Exercise Science and director of the J. B. Snow Biomechanics Laboratory, whose proposal entitled “Intensive diet and exercise in arthritis (IDEA) follow-up study” has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and WFU Health Sciences.

Wake Forest has been named a CUDA Teaching Center by NVIDIA Corporation. Dr. Sam Cho, assistant professor in computer science and physics, will coordinate the Teaching Center activities, which include teaching, research, and training. The department was awarded 50 GTX 480 GPU cards valued at $20,000 for classroom and research use by Cho.

Congratulations to Paul Pauca, whose proposal entitled “Challenging Ocular Image Recognition (COIR)” has been funded by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) and Carnegie Mellon University.

Robert Plemmons, Reynolds Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, has received funding from the University of New Mexico and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for his proposal “Novel Imaging Tools for Improved Space Object Identification.”