08-14-2023. CCAM Faculty Yan, Acker and Loew publish a paper on near infrared fluorescent voltage sensors in PNAS. The organic synthesis of the new ElectroFluor dyes is described as well as an application to optogenetic activation and sensing of cardiac action potentials in live mouse hearts.

Yan, P.; Acker, C. D.; Biasci, V.; Judge, G.; Monroe, A.; Sacconi, L.; Loew, L. M. (2023). Near-Infrared Voltage-Sensitive Dyes Based on Chromene Donor. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 120 (34), e2305093120.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2305093120

Michael Blinov and Sophia Pidvysotski, a high school senior student at Miss Porter’s, a research apprentice at CCAM, are featured in the UConn today devoted to  UConn Health’s High School Research Apprentice Program: 

Connecticut High School Students Conducting Research at UConn Health

Prof Margaret Johnson from John Hopkins University and Michael Blinov are hosting the Special Interest Subgroup session on Biophysical Modeling of the Cell at Cell Bio 2023 – an ASCB/EMBO (https://www.ascb.org/cellbio2023/) meeting in Boston, MA, December 2-6. The session will take place on Wednesday, December 6, 8:30 AM – 11:00 AM (https://www.ascb.org/cellbio2023/program/subgroups/).

06-28-2023. The  24th Annual Computational Cell Biology (CCB) workshop took place at the Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling (CCAM) on June 26-28th. 11 participants from all over the US (from Maryland to Illinois) came to Farmington to work on developing their modeling projects using VCell and COPASI software tools, designed and maintained at CCAM. The students were helped by a CCAM team consisting of Michael Blinov, Ann Cowan, Leslie Loew, Pedro Mendes, Ion Moraru, Kelvin Peterson, Jim Schaff, Nathan Schaumburger, and Boris Slepchenko.

26 June 2023. Congratulations to Dr. Kshitiz and Dr. Afzal from UCSF that published Research Highlights in Nature on “CRISPRing the hypertrophic cardiomyopathy: correcting one pathogenic variant at a time”, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41392-023-01526-0