Little Einsteins Organization (LEO) is a chartered Georgia Tech campus organization that conducts science, technology, engineering, and math focused activities with children in Atlanta.

Each week, LEO works with more than 150 kids at various elementary schools in Atlanta. The organization has more than 100 Georgia Tech student members and nearly 2,000 followers on Instagram. Membership is open to all undergraduate and graduate Georgia Tech students.

The past two years have presented many challenges for those involved in education, but that hasn’t stopped Georgia Tech’s Little Einsteins Organization from helping provide students in K-5 schools with instruction and activities focused on STEM. 

They’ve accomplished that by changing how they bring science and engineering to the kids — meeting at Hands on Atlanta for science demonstrations, and sending kits to local libraries for children and their families to take home — so that children can perform experiments found in do-it-yourself kits assembled by Georgia Tech volunteers.

“I think they have done wonderful outreach activities, and have been so creative and committed to reach out, despite the very different pandemic landscape,” says Pamela Pollet, LEO academic advisor and senior academic professional in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “This project is unique because it gives Georgia Tech students the opportunity to support the education of young children in Atlanta during a time of isolation and online schooling.”

Pollet says the pandemic hasn’t kept LEO student and instructor volunteers from keeping their commitment to Atlanta’s students, especially those in underserved communities. 

And before Covid, Pollet saw firsthand LEO’s impact when volunteers helped the younger students conduct experiments in their schools. “Their friend’s volcano erupted much more than theirs. Why? What was different? ‘How come my catapult is not working?’ It is okay if it does not work — let’s take a look and think how we can make it work," she shares. "LEO members created a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere in which students were so engaged and curious.”

There was also the opportunity for Atlanta children to see future versions of themselves in the Georgia Tech students. “They recognized themselves or connected with LEO members as if they were in an age group of older sisters or brothers. It demystified the image given to a scientist or engineer.”

Olivia Gravina, a fourth-year undergraduate in the School of Mathematics, serves as LEO president for the 2021-22 school year. Gravina says one of the group’s latest efforts to get creative during Covid challenges involved putting together at-home STEM kits for kids involved in Hands On Atlanta’s "Disco" program, formerly known as the Discovery program. Disco is a Saturday morning enrichment program which currently offers STEM, social emotional learning, fitness, and health-related activities to K-5 youth across nine Atlanta-area schools.

“We made 150 homemade ice pack kits, and 150 soap Silly Putty kits,” Gravina says. Teams of LEO members made instructional videos for each of the activities which included explanations of the science behind them. Then, Tech's LEO members joined Zoom calls with students from schools involved in the Disco program. 

“The young students had the opportunity to ask questions, and Georgia Tech students were able to encourage the younger students and see the impact of the kits they had provided,” Gravina shares.

Another recent activity, a collaboration with Fulton County Libraries, saw LEO members assembling kits for building small catapults, which also included instructional videos. “We delivered 620 catapult-making kits, which translates to 20 kits in each of the 31 branches of the Fulton County Library System,” Gravina explains.

“It was absolutely brilliant to use the libraries, kits and videos to maintain the excitement of hands-on experimenting,” Pollet adds.

“It was needed even more, especially for younger kids. Being virtual all day leaves many of them disconnected from the material and what science is about: Experiments, observations, questions, analysis," Pollet shares. "And again, they can connect the experiments with Georgia Tech students they can easily relate to.”

Gravina says LEO is still working through plans for the season ahead, but hopes to continue coordinating activities in Atlanta libraries. She encourages other Georgia Tech students to join those activities.

Pollet says the ability to show younger students that they could eventually pursue science careers is critical, pandemic or no pandemic.

“Young, dynamic Tech students who are doing science, and taking the time to do it with them,” Pollet says. “That is really inspiring.”

More information on Little Einsteins Organization is available on their website, and on their Instagram page. Learn more about Hands On Atlanta’s Disco program here. 

The Georgia Tech College of Computing has received an $11 million grant from Schmidt Futures to create one of the four software engineering centers within the newly launched Virtual Institute for Scientific Software (VISS). The new center will hire half-a-dozen software engineers to write scalable, reliable, and portable open-source software for scientific research.

“Scientific research involves increasingly complex software, technologies, and platforms,” said Alessandro Orso, the software engineer and professor of computer science who is heading up the project. “Also, platforms constantly evolve, and the complexity and amount of data involved is ever-growing.”

The result is that these software systems are often developed as prototypes that are difficult to understand, maintain, and use, which limits their efficacy and ultimately hinders scientific progress.

Software engineers are trained to address these kinds of issues and know how to build high-quality software, but their time is too expensive for a typical research project’s budget. In typical grants, software is often treated as a byproduct of research, meaning that limited funding is allocated for it.

That’s where Schmidt Futures comes in. Schmidt Futures is a philanthropic initiative founded by Eric and Wendy Schmidt that bets early on exceptional people making the world better. They are investing $40 million in VISS over five years at four universities: Georgia Tech, University of Washington, Johns Hopkins University, and University of Cambridge.

“Schmidt Futures’ Virtual Institute for Scientific Software is a core part of our efforts to mobilize exceptional talent to solve specific hard problems in science and society,” said Executive Vice President Elizabeth Young-McNally.

At Georgia Tech, the funds will hire a software engineering lead, as well as three senior and two junior software engineers. A faculty director and an advisory board will help guide the group’s work, which will include collaborations with Georgia Tech scientists.

"We are very proud to host one of the four inaugural Schmidt Futures Virtual Institute of Scientific Software centers,” said Charles Isbell, Dean and John P. Imlay Jr. Chair of Computing.

“Georgia Tech’s center will advance and support scientific research by applying modern software engineering practices, cutting-edge technologies, and modern tools to the development of scientific software. The center will also engage with students and researchers to train the next generation of software engineering leaders.”

Microorganisms are highly abundant in the surface ocean, reaching densities exceeding a billion organisms per liter. Collectively responsible for roughly half of global carbon fixation, diverse groups of microbes coexist while relying on limited nutrients even as some microbes depend on energy from the sun to grow via photosynthesis. 

Precisely because microbes compete for scarce nutrients, how such a vast diversity of ocean microbes coexist has long puzzled scientists. A collaborative group of researchers from 13 institutions aimed to shed light on the subject as part of new work published today in Nature Ecology and Evolution led by Joshua Weitz, Professor and Tom and Marie Patton Chair in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech.

“The pressing matter of survival for many microorganisms at the surface is acquiring enough nitrogen,” explains Daniel Muratore, a doctoral candidate in Quantitative Biosciences at Georgia Tech and one of three co-first authors of the study. “Since microbes need to acquire nitrogen to function, we might imagine that the particular microbial type that is best at acquiring nitrogen will ultimately win – because it'll be able to grow faster than everything else. And yet that's not the case.”

By integrating data on the timing of metabolic processes of different microbes in the surface ocean throughout the 24-hour light cycle – from the transcription of genes for metabolic proteins to the synthesis of macromolecules like lipids – the researchers discovered that the coexistence of diverse microbes is shaped by the timing of uptake.

“What we saw when we let the data speak for itself was that nitrogen uptake and assimilation had some of the most distributed timing, where different microbes are doing similar metabolic processes at different times of day,” Muratore explains. While genes associated with the uptake of a scarcer resource like nitrogen were transcribed at different times by different organisms, microbes tended to transcribe genes related to carbon metabolism and photosynthesis during daytime hours while the sun was shining.

With staggered nitrogen uptake, Muratore points out that “instead of having to compete with the whole field, [microbes] only have to compete with the organisms that share that specific shift with them. Perhaps that's one way that the competition is alleviated and can facilitate all of these diverse microbes being able to live off of the same nutrient source.”

A deep dive into microbial metabolism

The study began in 2015, when scientists across disciplines in the Simons Foundation’s Simons Collaboration on Ocean Processes and Ecology (SCOPE) collected different types of data looking at microbes in the surface of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, the Earth’s largest stretch of contiguous ocean. “[We were interested in] understanding how that fluctuation of photosynthesis during the day and the absence thereof at night propagates through the microbial community [in the ocean],” explains Angela Boysen, co-first author on the study who conducted this research while a doctoral student at the University of Washington and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago. “Fluctuations in energy input influence how the ecosystem overall functions, how much carbon is stored, where the carbon moves around, and how organisms might interact with each other.”

Data on metabolic processes were collected simultaneously from the same body of water every four hours, giving researchers an unprecedented look at how metabolic activity differs among these microbes throughout the 24-hour day-night cycle. “Collecting all these different sample types – genes, metabolites, lipids, chemical, etc. – at the same time is really a first way to look at the whole ecosystem all at once from all these different perspectives,” Matthew Harke, a co-first author of the study and a research scientist at the Gloucester Marine Genomics Institute, shares. “That's something that has rarely, if at all, been done.”

The research cruise ultimately yielded data on over 65,000 unique genetic transcripts, metabolic markers, and macromolecules over time in multiple types of organisms, making the integration and interpretation of the data a big challenge. To make the data more interpretable, authors turned to machine learning methods, which work to cluster together data with similar patterns over time. 

The emergent data clusters revealed that most of the activity occurred at four time points: dusk (6 p.m.), night (2 a.m.), morning (6 a.m.), afternoon (between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m.). While these times were important for the many types of microbes studied, the key metabolic activities at each time differed. For instance, photosynthesizing microbes expressed genes coding for proteins important in nitrogen uptake pathways the most at dusk, while organisms that rely on external organic matter for energy expressed these genes most in the morning. Transcription of genes associated with iron uptake, another scarce resource in the open ocean, also took place at different times across species.

By uncovering new evidence that staggering resource uptake is potentially critical for the co-existence of diverse marine microbes, Harke highlights that “this paper really makes us re-think our perception of what it’s like to be a microbe in the ocean.” The ocean is vast, and the researchers are hoping to examine how widely their findings hold.

“In the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, we see fairly stable waters, we have day and night cycles that are fairly stable across the seasons,” Harke explains. “What does it look like in an area of the world where that’s not stable? Do these types of things repeat themselves in coastal regions, or at other scales that we might want to look at, or other parts of the world with different dynamics that might be influencing physiology? Those are the big questions that come out of this.”

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01606-w

This work was supported by grants from the Simons Foundation as part of the SCOPE collaboration (Simons Foundation grants 329108, 721244, 721223, 721252, 721256, 724220, 723787, 721229, 721225, and 721231), an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Postdoctoral Scholarship Program at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution & U.S. Geological Survey, and the Simons Collaboration on Computational Biogeochemical Modeling of Marine Ecosystems (Simons Foundation grant 549894).

The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics (ASPET) has announced that a 2022 Molecular Pharmacology Early Career Award will be presented to Dr. Matthew Torres, faculty member in the School of Biological Sciences, in recognition of his scholarly achievements as a junior investigator in the field of molecular pharmacology.

Dr. Torres is receiving this award in recognition of his innovative research that combines genetics, mass spectrometry, and cutting-edge bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications impact protein function and cell physiology, and also in recognition of his strong commitment to teaching, mentoring and service. Dr. Torres is currently an Associate Professor in the School. He received his PhD in biochemistry and completed his postdoctoral training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The primary focus of Dr. Torres’s lab is to combine yeast genetics, mass spectrometry (MS) and bioinformatics to understand how post-translational modifications (PTMs) impact protein structure, function and cell behavior. His group studies how PTMs regulate G protein signaling pathways, with a current emphasis on the G protein gamma subunit. His lab also developed SAPH-ire (“Systematic Analysis of PTM Hotspots”), a bioinformatics tool that employs machine learning to prioritize PTMs important for protein function and provide recommendations for experimental analysis. Dr. Torres has been a member of ASPET since 2017.

The award will be presented by the Division for Molecular Pharmacology at the ASPET Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on Monday, April 4, 2022 where Dr. Torres will deliver a lecture on his research titled "From m/z to G_αβγ: Accessing the Collective Wisdom in Proteomics to Reveal Posttranslational Governors of G protein Signaling".

The talk will focus on the development of protein bioinformatic and computational tools that revealed how G_γ subunits - through phosphorylation of their intrinsically disordered N-termini - can serve as governors of G_βγ signaling.

Story adapted from:

2022 ASPET Award Winners

Severe and persistent disability often undermines the life-saving benefits of cancer treatment. Pain and fatigue — together with sensory, motor, and cognitive disorders — are chief among the constellation of side effects that occur with the platinum-based agents used widely in chemotherapy treatments worldwide.

A new study by Georgia Tech researchers in the lab of Timothy C. Cope has found a novel pathway for understanding why these debilitating conditions happen for cancer patients and why scientists should focus on all of the possible neural processes that deliver sensory or motor problems to a patient’s brain — including the central nervous system — and not just the “peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons” that occurs away from the center of the body.

The new findings “Neural circuit mechanisms of sensorimotor disability in cancer treatment” are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) and could impact development of effective treatments that are not yet available for restoring a patient’s normal abilities to receive and process sensory input as part of post cancer treatment, in particular.

Stephen N. (Nick) Housley, a postdoctoral researcher in the School of Biological Sciences, the Integrated Cancer Research Center, and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience at Georgia Tech, is the study’s lead author. Co-authors include Paul Nardelli, research scientist and Travis Rotterman, postdoctoral fellow (both of the School of Biological Sciences), along with Timothy Cope, who serves as a professor with joint appointments in the School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech and in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.

Neurologic consequences

“Chemotherapy undoubtedly negatively influences the peripheral nervous system, which is often viewed as the main culprit of neurologic disorders during cancer treatment,” shares Housley. However, he says, for the nervous system to operate normally, both the peripheral and central nervous system must cooperate.

“This occurs through synaptic communication between neurons. Through an elegant series of studies, we show that those hubs of communication in the central nervous system are also vulnerable to cancer treatment’s adverse effects,” Housley shares, adding that the findings force “recognition of the numerous places throughout the nervous system that we have to treat if we ever want to fix the neurological consequences of cancer treatment — because correcting any one may not be enough to improve human function and quality of life.”

“These disabilities remain clinically unmitigated and empirically unexplained as research concentrates on peripheral degeneration of sensory neurons,” the research team explains in the study, “while understating the possible involvement of neural processes within the central nervous system. The present findings demonstrate functional defects in the fundamental properties of information processing localized within the central nervous system,” concluding that “long-lasting sensorimotor and possibly other disabilities induced by cancer treatment result from independent neural defects compounded across both peripheral and central nervous systems.”

Sensorimotor disabilities and ‘cOIN’

The research team notes that cancer survivors “rank sensorimotor disability among the most distressing, long-term consequences of chemotherapy. Disorders in gait, balance, and skilled movements are commonly assigned to chemotoxic damage of peripheral sensory neurons without consideration of the deterministic role played by the neural circuits that translate sensory information into movement,” adding that this oversight “precludes sufficient, mechanistic understanding and contributes to the absence of effective treatment for reversing chemotherapy-induced disability.”

Cope says the team resolved this omission “through the use of a combination of electrophysiology, behavior, and modeling to study the operation of a spinal sensorimotor circuit in vivo” in a rodent model of “chronic, oxaliplatin (chemotherapy)–induced neuropathy: cOIN.”

Key sequential events were studied in the encoding of “propriosensory” information (think kinesthesia: the body's ability to sense its location, movements, and actions) and its circuit translation into the synaptic potentials produced in motoneurons.

In the “cOIN” rats, the team noted multiple classes of propriosensory neurons expressed defective firing that reduced accurate sensory representation of muscle mechanical responses to stretch, adding that accuracy “degraded further in the translation of propriosensory signals into synaptic potentials as a result of defective mechanisms residing inside the spinal cord.”

Joint expression, independent defects

“These sequential, peripheral, and central defects compounded to drive the sensorimotor circuit into a functional collapse that was consequential in predicting the significant errors in propriosensory-guided movement behaviors demonstrated here in our rat model and reported for people with cOIN,” Cope and Housley report. “We conclude that sensorimotor disability induced by cancer treatment emerges from the joint expression of independent defects occurring in both peripheral and central elements of sensorimotor circuits.”

“These findings have broad impact on the scientific field and on clinical management of neurologic consequences of cancer treatment,” Housley says. “As both a clinician and scientist, I can envision the urgent need to jointly develop quantitative clinical tests that have the capacity to identify which parts of a patient nervous system are impacted by their cancer treatment.”

Housley also says that having the capacity to monitor neural function across various sites during the course of treatment “will provide a biomarker on which we can optimize treatment — e.g. maximize anti-neoplastic effects while minimizing the adverse effects,” adding that, as we move into the next generation cancer treatments, “clinical tests that can objectively monitor specific aspects of the nervous system will be exceptionally important to test for the presence off-target effect.”

***

FUNDING: This work is supported by NIH Grants R01CA221363 and R01HD090642 and the Northside Hospital Foundation, Inc.

DOI: doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2100428118

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: The researchers thank Marc Binder (Department of Physiology & Biophysics at University of Washington) and Todd Streelman (School of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech) for providing useful discussions and comments on a preliminary version of the manuscript. Lead author Housley also serves as chief scientific officer for Motus Nova, a healthcare robotics and technology company.

***

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 44,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

James Stringfellow, an employment specialist with a history of helping Atlanta-based veterans and entertainment industry staff in the workforce, has been named the first career educator for the College of Sciences.

“I am thrilled to have James join the Georgia Tech Career Center,” says Laura Garcia, director of Career Education Programs. “I hope everyone gives him a warm welcome to the Georgia Tech community.” 

Stringfellow, who began his duties on January 4, leads the following initiatives:

• Assisting students with career mapping, co-op and internships, and workforce preparedness.
• Supporting College of Sciences programs by facilitating career education events.
• Supporting College instructors with employer updates and industry trends.
• Developing employer partnerships to cultivate employment opportunities. 
• Assisting the Career Center team in meeting its community goals.

Stringfellow will be available for remote meetings from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Mondays and Tuesdays. He will work out of Room 2-90 in the Boggs Building from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays and Thursdays, and at the Georgia Tech Career Center (located on the first floor of the Bill Moore Student Success Center) from 8 p.m. to 5 p.m. on Fridays.

Stringfellow previously worked for the Veterans Empowerment Organization (VEO) as their employment specialist responsible for assisting veterans with re-entry into the civilian workforce. Prior to the VEO, he served as an award-winning career services manager at SAE Institute where he oversaw employer outreach and graduate employment for audio, film, and entertainment business programs. Stringfellow also worked for DeVry University in both career services and admissions in support of its College of Health Sciences.  

Stringfellow earned a bachelor’s degree in Marketing from Tuskegee University, and received his MBA in International Business from Keller Graduate School of Management at DeVry. A member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Stringfellow shares that he stays connected to the entertainment industry by coaching creatives on how to protect their musical brand, speaking at related conferences, and serving as a disc jockey at various events throughout Atlanta.

“I am thrilled to have James join the College of Sciences,” shares Cameron Tyson, assistant dean for Academic Programs in the College of Sciences. 

Tyson and Garcia also extend a special thanks to the new role’s search committee for their “hard work and finding a great addition to our team.” Committee members included:

• Alonzo Whyte (search chair), academic professional, Undergraduate Neuroscience Program
• Andrew Newman, professor and undergraduate coordinator, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• Enid Steinbart, principal academic professional and director of Undergraduate Advising and Assessment, School of Mathematics
• Mariah Liggins, advisor for Pre-Health, Pre-Graduate and Pre-Professional Advising
• Mackenzie Pierce, undergraduate student, School of Psychology

Because humans and animals breathe and metabolize oxygen, they generate a variety of reactive oxygen species (ROS), or cell-damaging oxidants, as byproducts. Our bodies usually make enough antioxidants to counter that damage, but when that balance starts to favor oxidants, they can attack important biomolecules like proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. That can lead to cancer, neurodegenerative disorders, and cardiovascular diseases.

Fortunately, our bodies evolved to produce antioxidant enzymes such as Cu/Zn (copper/zinc) superoxide dismutase, or SOD1, which detoxifies certain harmful oxidants. In a weird twist, SOD1 is the only antioxidant enzyme that can take on one specific oxidant, superoxide, only to produce another ROS: hydrogen peroxide.

A team of Georgia Tech researchers have published a study that found an even stranger twist to this oxidant-antioxidant tale: SOD1 (good for cells) produces hydrogen peroxide (bad for cells) which stimulates the production of another important cellular antioxidant known as NADPH (also good for cells; more on this in a moment.)

“Yes, you heard that right,” says Amit Reddi, associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “SOD1, an antioxidant enzyme, produces an oxidant, hydrogen peroxide, which in turn stimulates the production of another (good) antioxidant.”

Reddi is a co-author of this research along with Matthew Torres, associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences; Claudia Montllor-Albalate, former Reddi Lab member who received her Ph.D. in 2020 from the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry; Hyojung Kim, School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Ph.D. candidate; Annalise Thompson, a third-year graduate student in Reddi’s lab; and Alex Jonke, research scientist with the School of Biological Sciences. 

Their study, “SOD1 Integrates Oxygen Availability to Redox Regulate NADPH Production and the Thiol Redoxome” is published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

The NADPH/GAPDH connection

NADPH (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate) is an important metabolite that is produced in cells. It provides a source of electrons that can act as an antioxidant and for the biosynthesis of numerous biomolecules, including fatty acids, amino acids, nucleotides, and cholesterol. 

“NADPH is not only used as an antioxidant, but also to build new biomolecules to sustain cell proliferation,” Reddi says. “How do cells know to make enough NADPH to support aerobic life?  We discovered that SOD1 senses oxygen availability via superoxide, and then converts this to hydrogen peroxide, which in turn inactivates an enzyme responsible for the breakdown of glucose, glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase (GAPDH).” That inactivation causes the build-up of metabolites that are re-routed to a pathway that synthesizes NADPH.

The story behind the SOD1 revelation

The PNAS research study began with a casual conversation in 2014 between Reddi and Torres at the former café in the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB). 

“Given the very collaborative and collegial nature of faculty across the College of Sciences, and the Institute as a whole, it was easy to grab a coffee and discuss these ideas,” Reddi says. Work in the Reddi lab includes potential signaling roles for SOD1 and the hydrogen peroxide it produces; but understanding the extent to which these factors regulate signaling required a systems-level understanding of how widespread targets of SOD1 are in a cell. 

Torres focuses on mass spectrometry-based proteomics (the study of all proteins produced and modified by an organism or system) to probe cell-wide signaling networks, so it seemed to Reddi like a perfect fit.

Then, Reddi says, Montllor-Albalate made the discovery that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide can regulate NADPH production and adaptation to aerobic life.  Meanwhile, Kim, a joint student of the Reddi and Torres labs, drove the work to identify proteome-wide targets of SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide. 

The conversation in IBB led to a 2016 grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the topic further. The resulting paper “we feel will make a strong impact in the field of redox biology and signaling,” Reddi adds. 

SOD1’s potential in future cancer therapy

SOD1 is often thought of as an appealing anti-cancer therapeutic because of its ability to scavenge superoxides. The theory is that if SOD1 is inactivated, cancer cells will be at a disadvantage. 

Reddi says his team’s results “suggest this very simple approach may need to be reconsidered, because the hydrogen peroxide that is produced by SOD1 plays broader roles in metabolism — and regulates many other enzymes and pathways. For instance, many cancer cells are addicted to glucose (sugars) and have an increased reliance on it for energy and metabolism, with GAPDH being a key enzyme in the process. Our findings that SOD1-derived hydrogen peroxide inactivates GAPDH would suggest that inhibiting SOD1 in certain cancers could actually result in elevated GAPDH activity, and increased metabolism of glucose, which may be detrimental in fighting cancer.”

Torres and Reddi are continuing their collaboration to investigate other aspects of SOD1 and hydrogen peroxide signaling in cancer metabolism and its implications for disease progression.

doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2023328119

This work was supported by GM118744 to Reddi and Torres, and Blanchard Fellowship to Reddi.