Dr. Bill Farland, Vice President for Research at Colorado State University and formerly top scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency, has been named to two prestigious National Academies of Science committees that address environmental issues and their impact on human health.
Dr. Farland has been selected as chair of the National Research Council committee on Emerging Science for Environmental Health Decisions, which will focus on new discoveries and technologies used in the identification and control of environmental impacts on human health. The committee will facilitate communication among government and industry leaders as well as representatives of academic and environmental groups. It also will produce a series of workshops related to health and the environment.
Dr. Farland also has been named to a new National Research Council committee established by the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology that will address risks associated with environmentally released nanomaterials. The committee will investigate and write a report about whether certain materials in nano form are more hazardous than their larger counterparts to health and the environment.
Chromatin proteins get their wires crossed and misbehave without a critical protein that acts as a chaperone, according to new research from Colorado State University that appeared last month in the journal Molecular Cell.
The collaborative research, spearheaded by University Distinguished Professor Karolin Luger and Professor Laurie Stargell in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, proves for the first time that eliminating the histone chaperone nucleosome assembly protein 1, known as Nap1, in a yeast cell leads to the wrong types of interaction in the cell by chromatin proteins, which could lead to cancer and disease.
“There’s this group of proteins in each cell that are called chaperones and literally, it has always been proposed that what they do is what human chaperones do - prevent inappropriate interactions between partners and help make the right interactions,” said Dr. Luger, who also is a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator. “With this paper we’ve proven that this is really the case for this particular protein. The chaperones prevent hanky-panky between partners who like each other, but have no business being together.”
