The fruit fly is a celebrated veteran guinea pig for research in genetics. This infamy results from its large chromosomes, numerous varieties and rapid rate of reproduction. Recently, this mundane insect has helped with finding a therapy to fight the onslaught of colorectal cancer!

Imagine cancer not as a disease but as a prisoner on the run; chances of escape increase if there are seldom check posts in its way. The ‘check posts’ here refer to a complex system within the body to regulate and, well, keep a check on cell growth rate. Too high a rate and we risk the onset of cancer. Sometimes, however, help from the military is deployed to put an end to the prison escape.

Working at the Biomedical Informatics Research Lab (BIRL) in Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering, Dr. Safee Ullah Chaudhry and his team have discovered a new way to put an end to erroneous cell growth of very specific cells, in this case, cells that cause colorectal cancer. However, not all colorectal cancers are made alike.

Dr. Safee Ullah’s team also worked on patient-specific mutation data along with combinations of therapeutic drugs, specifically Zoledronate in combination with Trametinib, to come up with up a model that will help better understand the highly elusive and variable nature of colorectal cancer’s genetic genesis.

Dr. Shahzad ul Hussan, an outstanding researcher and teacher, has been awarded tenure at SBASSE LUMS. He is our resident biochemist and leads a strong research group on structural biology which is a nascent field in Pakistan. He investigates the structural forms of proteins on the surfaces of viruses. An accurate structural determination is often the first step in identifying cures for infections and for the development of preventive viral vaccines. 

The main tool for his research is the 600 MHz NMR spectrometer, which is the most sophisticated instrument of its kind, outside of Karachi. Shahzad helped LUMS develop this facility and was the key player rallying for its establishment, culminating in a generous gift of over a million Euros from Syed Babar Ali. 

Shahzad employs innovative techniques in biochemistry and structural biophysics to investigate proteins that encapsulate viral surfaces and proteins in host cells which are targeted by these proteins. His work primarily focuses on diseases prevalent in the Pakistani population: HIV-AIDS, Hepatitis C, dengue and more recently COVID-19. With about 5% of the Pakistani population being carriers of Hepatitis C, the potential impact of Shahzad’s work can be appreciated. 

Working with the Government of Punjab, he has also helped develop a laboratory for the AIDS program, funded by the World Health Organization.  Three of his latest representative articles are just a sample of the work that Shahzad has produced, all with PhD students and indigenously developed expertise and facilities. Articles:

Computers in Biology and Medicine 122, 103848: https://bit.ly/3faDnoU

Viruses 12 (2), 199: https://bit.ly/2Usi1K9

Medicinal Research Reviews 39 (3), 1091-1136: https://bit.ly/3f40qBz

In the coming years, we hope to see Shahzad's work expand, and in becoming a nursery for the understanding of disease and the design of therapeutic tools.

“Leave the planet better than we found it”. Does that ring a bell? Have you read this before? Although we are an insignificantly small twig on the grand tree of life, watered and nurtured by mother Earth, the acute protection of Earth’s biosphere is among our most cardinal responsibilities to nature. If we are to become a responsible citizen of the planet, understanding the tightly intertwined coexistence of life and its environment is obligatory. It is like parting the curtains of ignorance and taking a peek into realisation that as much as the environment depends on what we do to it, we depend much more critically to what it does to us.

Dr. Fozia Parveen’s online course titled Introduction to Environmental Science, SCI103 for short, is therefore your gateway to an aware, more responsible and sincere citizen of the greater biome we all share. The discussions are extremely friendly, student-centered and engaging. The course includes lectures on the biosphere, biotic and abiotic ecosystems and a range of different types of environments that exist (terrestrial, aquatic, marine and freshwater). From the study of soil and air to how waste disposal is a shaping up to become a looming threat for our future generations’ health and well-being – the course also includes discussions on our local environmental problems and how global best practices can be morphed to suit our local needs and limitations. The course is an important component of the undergraduate program at SBASSE.

Of all our doing in this brief phase of life and awareness, we are but to return the debt we have accumulated from consuming the flora and fauna over our lifetime. By helping establish a sense of community between the student and their larger environment, this course hopes to waft our sense of wonderment and responsibility to preserve this ecosystem and leave it indeed better than we had found it.

Glass is glass - and glass can break. A panel of tempered glass in SBASSE’s Central Lab mysteriously shattered, creating a mesmerising pattern, the cause of which is still under investigation.

There is some appetite for the notion that tempered glass is unbreakable. That is simply incorrect. Tempered glass is created by special heating and cooling processes that induce internal stresses which are released suddenly in the presence of triggers such as micro-cracks. Unlike regular glass, the tempered glass breaks into small chunks which are relatively harmless, compared to the long, jagged splinters that can cause serious injury.

Isn’t it wonderful that seemingly blind laws of nature that choreographed this shatter pattern have also birth forth the formation of the human eye, brain and the associated neural network, which help us look back at nature in awe of its raw beauty, even in chaos!

Survival – life lusts for it. Its strategies and decisions, from birth till death, are guided by survival. It is an instinct that’s hard wired into every living being on this planet. Thus, it is the common denominator between us and the coronavirus. Both of us are united by the need to survive, thrive and spread. In this skirmish of biological dominance, human perseverance has been challenged and has contested its viral counterpart with fervour. At the forefront of the battle strategy are researchers like Dr. Wala Saadeh who are keen on helping covid-19 patients deal with this terrible disease without making regular visits to the hospital environment, where they risk spreading the virus to others.

We are delighted to announce that Dr. Wala Saadeh has won a grant of USD 93,000 for her project to remotely monitor vitals of covid-19 patients using wearable devices, thereby decreasing their exposure to a hospital environment, and helping reduce financial toils of regular hospital visits. This is poised to be the world’s first complete vitals monitoring system-on-chip solution. Dr. Wala sees to develop a device that can measure and track a variety of vitals such as body temperature, heart rate and its variations, respiratory rate, blood oxygen level and blood pressure. This device will also be available to patients presenting symptoms of the common flu, asthma and non-covid-19 related diseases like SARS, H1N1, etc.

Her grant comes as a result of her winning proposal for the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) Engage Transform Fund. Her project was selected among the top 30 from around 5000 applications, worldwide. We offer our heartiest congratulations to Dr. Wala Saadeh and wish her success in fulfilling her wonderful project.

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Khurram Bashir to the Biology Department. He brings in a new realm of investigation into the School, in the areas of plant biology and agricultural biotechnology. Khurram is considered a pioneer in drought resistant crops, which are a vital need for feeding millions of people in water-starved climates. Furthermore, his scientific investigations deal with maintaining the concentration levels and uptake of minerals and metals in plants. 

A PhD from the University of Tokyo and research scientist at the Center for Sustainable Resource Sciences, RIKEN, which many consider to the be cornerstone of Japan's prosperity, Khurram will bring in years of experience and expertise, evidenced by his outstanding records in publication, patents and grants. 

We are extremely delighted to see the area of agriculture – be it innovative farming, gardening agricultural soil, the interlink between nutrition and water – develop further in LUMS and hope Khurram can inspire this new crop of investigators and lead our efforts in improving our population's quality of life.

A Summer Research Internships for High-School and College Students webinar is being held by Dr. Samir Iqbal. This seminar will cover the following topics:

1. Find research grants to support research engagement.
2. Understand the research direction of a professor.
3. Find research programs in the top universities.
4. Prepare a compelling resume.

The course starts on 18th January 2021 and ends on 30th April 2021.

Classes will meet on Mondays and Wednesdays at 8 am Pakistan Time (GMT+5) for about an hour.

Please join the class here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCxmTCd924Pr4ELlv3yl3fA

The Syed Babar Ali School of Science and Engineering is pleased to announce that its 600 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer can now be accessed for molecular analysis. Send in your samples, according to our described protocols, and obtain high resolution spectra, both in one and two dimensions. This is a valuable tool for structure determination, screening of synthetic organic compounds, protein folding analysis, and drugs. The high resolution instrument, equipped with capabilities for acquiring signals from proton, carbon and other heteronuclei, allows a window into the molecular world with exceptional clarity.

The quest for a deeper understanding of life at the molecular level has led biologists to use organisms like bacterium, yeast, frog, mouse, fruit fly, and thale crest plant, etc., as model systems for experimentation. Some of these organisms have been used in science for centuries and they offer an opportunity to answer research questions that are otherwise impossible to answer through experiments on humans.

Although notorious for destroying fruit crops, the fruit fly has provided insights into the biggest mysteries of the 20th century, and scientific research on it has led to six Nobel Prizes! It is worth pondering: what is so fascinating about the ‘gnat’?

The common fruit fly—Drosophila Melanogaster—has been used for biological research for over a century. Drosophila Melanogaster offers a relative mean between the most complex and most simple biological systems known to science. E. coli, the microscopic bacterium, weighs about ten-trillionth of a gram. Homosapien, the amazingly complex descendant of the primates, weighs about a hundred thousand grams. The fruit fly falls at the approximate average of the two, weighing less than two thousandth of a gram. Humans tend to have a generation time of about ten thousand days whereas E. coli has a generation time of a hundredth of a day. The fruit fly again falls in between, having the generation time of about ten days. Even the total number of genes fall at the rough average between the two extremes—Drosophila Melanogaster has about fifteen thousand genes for four thousand in a bacterium and twenty-two thousand in humans.

The real exciting fact is that nearly 60% of the fruit fly DNA is conserved in humans and about 75% of the human disease-causing genes are fully conserved in their function in the Drosophila genome, which makes the fruit fly the best model organism to work on. The similarity is shocking to the extent that some geneticists think that “they were designed to help scientists” (The Guardian).

The journey started at the start of the 20th century in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan. Morgan and his students observed different mutations in Drosophila Melanogaster which helped them prove the Chromosomal Theory of Inheritance. This showed that genes indeed lie on the chromosomes. Gene Mapping, Genetic Recombination, Sex-Linked Inheritance, and Chromosomal Nondisjunction are the major achievements of Morgan’s Lab using the fruit fly. For their remarkable discoveries, the 1933 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was for the first time awarded to a non-physician—Thomas Hunt Morgan.

After Morgan’s demise, his students took on the job of exploring the fruit fly. His student, Hermann Joseph Mueller, used X-rays to induce genetic mutations and chromosomal changes in Drosophila Melanogaster. These mutants were then studied for the functional aspects of the mutations combined with their evolutionary value. Mueller was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946.

Towards the end of the 20th century, Drosophila Melanogaster once again solved the mystery of development when Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, and Eric F. Wieschaus used the fly embryo to understand the genetic control of development. This led the trio to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1995. Key developmental genes discovered in flies responsible for body axis formation and patterning are astonishingly conserved in humans and other vertebrates.

In the middle of the 20th century, Seymour Benzer at Caltech started using Drosophila Melanogaster to understand another mystery in biology—the atomic theory of behaviour.

He was interested in knowing about the ‘atoms’ of behaviour. Several behaviour genes were discovered in the fruit fly and it was the very first time when behavioural phenotype was proved to be due to the presence of specific genes in the genome. Benzer did not live to see the success of his work, but the ground-breaking work on the fruit fly circadian rhythm (sleep genes) by his postdoctoral fellows, Jeff Hall along with Michael Rosbash and Michael Young went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2017.

The Fly Room at SBASSE was started in 2009 when Dr. Muhammad Tariq, founding chair and associate professor at SBASSE, returned to Pakistan to establish a cutting-edge epigenetics research programme. The Fly Room at LUMS is the first and, so far, the only fruit fly lab in Pakistan and it is an integral part of learning fundamental concepts of genetics, developmental biology, molecular biology, and epigenetics at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Through specifically designed experiments for both undergraduates and graduates, students visually observe giant larval chromosomes, proteins associated with chromosomes, activation of genes in response to heat shock, and much more.

In the beginning, rearing flies at LUMS was a massive challenge due to largescale deaths of precious fly stocks because of fluctuating electricity issues and the breakdown of incubators in extreme heat. However, presently the Fly Room houses nearly five hundred different fly stocks, each of which is maintained in multiple vials to minimize the risk of loss of a specific fly stock due to the accidental death of these flies. Due to extremely high temperatures, flies related to various ongoing experimental research projects as well as for teaching laboratories are ordered only during winter times from the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Centre in Indiana, USA. As soon as these flies arrive, they pass through quarantine and then they are bred on specialised corn-starch food prepared in the biology department. Besides a walk-in incubator there are two refrigerated incubators maintained at 18˚C and 25˚C for maintaining stocks and experimentation, respectively.

The Fly Room is a busy place where students and researchers are either setting up fly crosses or analyzing results of their crosses by sitting long hours on stereo microscopes. Since setting up an experimental cross requires identifying female virgin flies as well as young males, it demands all researchers be extremely organised and available seven days a week. Moreover, the Fly Room also houses a microinjection facility which is used to inject freshly hatched embryos to generate transgenic flies required to understand the genetic and epigenetic basis of genes being probed by the Tariq Lab at LUMS. The Tariq Lab focuses on understanding how the identity of different cell types is maintained and how cell fates can be changed.

Answers to these fundamental questions have implications in the field of cancer and regenerative medicine. Genetic and molecular analysis has discovered two groups of genes known as the Polycomb group (silencers) and Trithorax group (activators) which are responsible for the maintenance of cell fates. The Fly Room aims to understand how activities of Polycomb group or Trithorax group can be modulated and consequent cell fates changed.

To honour the renowned tale of the fruit fly research and its contribution to understanding some of the major questions related to humans, the Drosophilists at the SBASSE call the Fly Room, the Morgan Room, in the loving memory of Thomas Hunt Morgan who was the pioneer of Drosophila research.

The fruit fly still has wonders to reveal…

Muhammad Abdullah Jauhar is a Biology Junior and member of the Epigenetics group (Tariq Lab) who coordinates all seminars of the MCB series.

John O’Rourke writes a raving review about Dr. Hamid Zaman’s book called “Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens”. John is the Editor of BU TODAY which is the official magazine of Boston University.

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For the past eight months, the world’s attention has been focused on the deadly health crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic which has already infected 30 million people and killed more than 950,000.

But in his gripping, highly readable new book, Biography of Resistance: The Epic Battle Between People and Pathogens (Harper Wave, 2020), Muhammad Hamid Zaman, a Boston University College of Engineering professor of biomedical engineering and of materials science and engineering, says there is an equally urgent crisis before us—drug-resistant infections.

More than 700,000 people die each year as a result of multidrug-resistant diseases, including at least 35,000 in the United States. And as Zaman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor, makes clear, the situation is getting more urgent.

Without action, he writes, we are likely to face an unimaginable public health crisis: “It will be like the great plague of the Middle Ages, the influenza pandemic of 1918, the AIDS crisis of the 1990s, and the Ebola epidemic of 2014 all combined into a single threat.”

A 2019 report issued by the United Nations Ad Hoc Interagency Coordination Group on Antimicrobial Resistance predicts that drug-resistant diseases could claim as many as 10 million lives a year by 2050.

Zaman notes that bacteria predate humans by 3.5 billion years and that from the beginning, they have proven resilient: “The multilayered bacterial defense mechanism—one of nature’s oldest creations, ever-evolving, ever-surprising—has learned to stay a step ahead of us at every single point in our history together.”

Chapter by chapter, Zaman, whose research currently focuses on antibiotic resistance in low-income countries and refugee settlements and who was recently awarded a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship, shows how bacteria have been able to quickly elude our arsenal of increasingly potent antibiotic drugs since the first ones were introduced for widespread use in the 1940s. He illustrates the myriad factors that have contributed to microbial resistance, including the overprescribing of antibiotics, counterfeit drugs that are often of poor quality, the large-scale use of antibiotics in agriculture, and ongoing wars and conflicts, which, he says, “contaminate waterways, destroy infrastructure, and create drug-resistant infections.”

The book is full of lively stories of brilliant scientists who have advanced our understanding of bacteria, antibiotics, and antibacterial resistance, from the German microbiologist Robert Koch, credited with discovering germ theory, to Mary Barber, the British bacteriologist who discovered that widespread use of penicillin had led to penicillin-resistant strains of staph, to Tore Midtvedt, the Norwegian researcher who discovered in the 1980s that people in his country were being prescribed 24 tons of antibiotics a year and that salmon were ingesting twice that amount via “antibiotic enhanced” fish food. But this is no mere hagiography: Zaman reveals the hubris and fierce competition that lies behind many of their stories.

John’s original review can be accessed here: https://bit.ly/3e99iaR 

Read more in our latest Issue of 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲: https://bit.ly/3qCunxH