In the news

The Aryal lab, in collaboration with Dr. Schaser (Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences) and Dr. Ferreira (Bindley Bioscience Center) has published a study titled "Multiplatform Lipid Analysis of the Brain of Aging Mice by Mass Spectrometry" in the Journal of Proteome Research. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of lipid alterations in the aging mouse brain and their potential links to neurodegenerative diseases. By employing multiple mass spectrometry-based lipidomic approaches, including Desorption Electrospray Ionization (DESI), a technique developed at Purdue, this research reveals age-dependent changes in lipid composition and their spatial distribution across different brain regions. The findings offer new insights into how lipid dysregulation may contribute to age-related neurological disorders.

The Aryal lab, in collaboration with the Kihara and Sherman labs at Purdue University, has published a study titled "Proteomic Analysis of Unicellular Cyanobacterium Crocosphaera subtropica ATCC 51142 under Extended Light or Dark Growth" in the Journal of Proteome Research. This research explores how cyanobacteria, key players in global carbon and nitrogen cycles, adapt their metabolism to prolonged light or dark conditions. By analyzing the cellular proteome of Crocosphaera subtropica 51142 beyond typical diurnal cycles, the study provides insights into how these photosynthetic bacteria integrate circadian and environmental cues to regulate essential processes like nitrogen fixation and photosynthesis.

Proteins are cellular workhorses, executing important tasks based on their specific functions. However, misfolded, mutated, inactive or overactive proteins are often the culprits behind disorders, including neurodegenerative diseases. Researchers need a greater understanding of how aging drives protein dysfunction to develop strategies to slow or even reverse these diseases.

Greater understanding of protein aggregation relative to aging is one small step toward slowing or even reversing neurogenerative diseases. Despite more than six decades of research in the field of neuroscience, many functions of the brain — the most complex organ in the human body — remain a mystery. Recent research conducted in the Purdue University College of Veterinary Medicine and the Bindley Bioscience Center revealed that scientists are one step closer to understanding the process that activates and deactivates specific proteins within our cells. This breakthrough could one day lead to enhanced treatments that may slow down or perhaps reverse the advance of neurogenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

Dr. Uma K. Aryal, a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Pathobiology at Purdue University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Director of the Purdue Proteomics Facility at the Bindley Bioscience Center, and his team have recently published a groundbreaking study exploring the molecular signatures of aging. By analyzing the brains of mice from three different age groups, they performed a comprehensive proteomic analysis, mapping thousands of phosphorylation sites and examining how these modifications change with age. Leveraging advanced mass spectrometry technology at the Purdue Proteomics Facility and a novel multi-protease digestion approach, the team identified hundreds of phosphorylated proteins significantly affected by aging, including several known to be involved in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases. This study provides valuable insights into age-related changes in the brain proteome, offering numerous potential protein targets for further research into how aging and neurodegenerative diseases like AD or PD impact brain function and contribute to disease progression.

Identification of nuclear protein’s critical role in cell degradation could lead to prevention or even reversal of age-related diseases

Purdue University researchers are developing and validating patent-pending poly (lactic-co-glycolic acid), or PLGA, nanoparticles modified with adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, to enhance immunotherapy effects against malignant tumors.

Nearly 130 Purdue faculty, staff and university leaders met in a Life and Health Sciences Summit on Oct. 19 to explore and define opportunities to deepen Purdue’s leadership in these fields. Ahead of the summit, faculty teams from seven colleges and 22 departments submitted 48 proposals for research topics where Purdue has unique, nationally leading strengths. Funding from a pool of up to $2 million was set aside to catalyze such faculty pursuits as part of a seed investment. “We received many submissions worthy of further exploration,” said Rams Subramanian, director of Bindley Bioscience Center. “Although only a few could be presented and discussed during the summit, our strong hope is that teams continue advancing their ideas.”

Every food has a unique, and invisible, chemical “fingerprint.” A researcher from Purdue University has discovered a quick and portable way to identify that fingerprint and sniff out food fraud on the go. Let’s say there’s a food you suspect isn’t quite as advertised. Maybe that cheese that’s supposedly been aging for five years doesn’t have the right funk or the saffron you bought doesn’t seem the right shade of red. How would you go about testing it? What would that even look like? Chemically, we have the ability to detect these differences in foods. If you send it off to an analytical chemist, they can pop the suspect food in their mass spectrometer—worth about half a million dollars and the size of a large closet—and let you know fairly precisely if there’s anything fishy with your fish. That’s not so accessible for the average shopper. Bartek Rajwa, a professor of bioinformatics at Purdue University, kept this issue in mind when he started looking at ways to detect food fraud. Was there a system that was relatively affordable? Could he make it portable? Could he find a way to have more immediate results, instead of waiting for weeks in a traditional lab test? In a word: yes. But it took him more than a few tries. “Food is obviously a very complex matrix,” says Rajwa. “If we could reproducibly register some kind of a unique pattern associated with the specific product, then, in theory, that might help [identify fraud].” Rajwa began looking for the food’s “fingerprint,” as he called it; the unique atomic makeup that would tell him definitively which slice of ham came from pork that had been cured for years in a Portuguese cave and which slice of ham was just painted to look that way.

Christina Ferreira, metabolomics analyst at Purdue’s Metabolite Profiling Facility and Center for Analytical Instrument Development, has created a simple workflow to deliver biological samples to a mass spectrometer to provide real-time data analysis without performing liquid chromatography.