UIC graduate students win poster and travel awards at Biophysical Society Meeting
Members of the Spille Lab attended the 69th Biophysical Society Meeting in Los Angeles, California, to present their research on the nanoscale organization of the cell nucleus.
Graduate student Ganesh Pandey won the Student Research Achievement Award (SRAA) for his poster presentation on the “Spatial organization of regulatory chromatin at transcription condensates”. He used single molecule super-resolution microscopy to discover a layered organization of the active and inactive chromatin marks around transcription condensates below the diffraction limit of optical microscopy.
Alisha Budhathoki, also a graduate student, received a travel award to present her work on “In vivo single-particle tracking in diffraction-sized biomolecular condensates". Her work revealed that in contrast to a popular model, RNA Polymerase II molecules that read out genetic information accumulate in accumulate in condensates by rapidly and specifically binding to DNA rather than through a phase-separation process.
Both graduate students work in the Spille Lab for experimental biophysics. The competitive awards highlight scientific contributions and their impact on advancing the field of Biophysics, specifically the molecular mechanisms involved in organizing and reading out genetic information in mammalian cells. Congratulations to both for this remarkable achievement!