Undergraduate Affiliate Network (UAN)

Red River Valley Section
American Chemical Society

Registration Includes: Friday Dinner, Saturday breakfast and lunch, meeting padfolio,  ASBMB, JBC and ACS collectables.

ALSO THIS YEAR - Breakout sessions on: Interview skills and building a resume for students (jobs, grad schools and professional school), time managment for all, and Grant writing/mock study panel

Travel Awards:  The top three biochemistry and molecular biology posters and one talk will be presented with a $400 travel award to support attending the ASBMB at the Experimental Biology Meeting in Anaheim. The Red River ACS will be awarding two $400 Travel awards for the top oral or best poster presentations so the students can present their work at the National ACS meeting in San Francisco.

Directions and Lodging:  The meeting will be held at NDSU. 

Friday night will be at the Alumni House (Building 5). Saturday's meeting will be at the NDSU Union (Building 43)
     - Directions: (Click Here)
     -  Parking : Visitor's lot is to the north of the Union.

Lodging: 

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Most eucaryotic genes are controlled by developmental, hormonal, tissue-specific, and/or nutritional cues. Insight into these complex regulatory events is fundamental to our understanding of the processes controlling cellular proliferation and oncogenesis, differentiation, and development.The long-term goal of the research in my laboratory focuses on investigating how estrogen and testosterone regulate gene expression, both physiologically and pathologically. To address this, we are investigating the structure and function of the estrogen- and testosterone-responsive ZEB-1 (dEF1) transcription factor. ZEB-1 both activates and represses transcription through as yet undetermined mechanisms to regulate target gene activity in reproductive tissues, bone, and T-cells. In addition, over expression of ZEB-1 is associated with numerous types of cancers including breast cancer, myometrial cancer, ovarian cancer, and endometrial cancer. We are examining how ZEB-1 regulates genes, what its target genes are, and what the resultant effects are in bone, the ovary, and the prostate. Thus, much of our research effort in the coming years will focus on the effects of estrogen and testosterone on gene activity in various reproductive cancers. Another area of research is the investigation of the transcriptional regulation of the chick ovalbumin gene. This gene serves as a model to investigate how a secondary or delayed transcriptional response gene is induced by estrogen in a tissue-specific manner. The expectation is that a better understanding of the events in this system will be broadly applicable to other secondary response genes in estrogen-responsive tissues.

Saturday's Pharmacutical Industry Presentation:
Dr. Robert A. Volkmann, SystaMedic Inc. Chemistry and Medicines: Providing Healthcare Solutions, Surprises and Challenges

Over the years, many scientific disciplines have converged to tackle the significant challenges associated with fighting diseases and their efforts have resulted in spectacular advances in the quality of human health. Chemistry has played a pivotal role in the discovery of medicines. Chemists, for example, have been instrumental in the isolation, structure elucidation and synthesis of natural products with important biological activities and have also put an enormous amount of time and energy into the design and synthesis of new molecules. These efforts have led to the discovery of many important medicines. The discovery process of medicines is enormously challenging and costly and requires multi parameter optimizations and a lot of good fortune. The fact is, however, that even with our current understanding of medicines and diseases, the majority of experimental medicines targeted for future use fail in clinical trials and never make it to the marketplace. This presentation will explain why drug discovery is so challenging and will highlight some important discoveries which have impacted the health and welfare of patients throughout the world. It will also focus on the formidable challenge of being able to forecast the in vivo activity of molecules in humans based on preclinical information


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