High-fat food biases hypothalamic and mesolimbic expression of consummatory drives.

Maintaining healthy body weight is increasingly difficult in our obesogenic environment. Dieting efforts are often overpowered by the internal drive to consume energy-dense foods. Although the selection of calorically rich substrates over healthier options is identifiable across species, the mechanisms behind this choice remain poorly understood.

A Massively Parallel Selection of Small Molecule-RNA Motif Binding Partners Informs Design of an Antiviral from Sequence.

Many RNAs cause disease; however, RNA is rarely exploited as a small-molecule drug target. Our programmatic focus is to define privileged RNA motif small-molecule interactions to enable the rational design of compounds that modulate RNA biology starting from only sequence. We completed a massive, library-versus-library screen that probed over 50 million binding events between RNA motifs and small molecules.

Evaluation of an Environmental Monitoring Program for the Microbial Safety of Air and Surfaces in a Dairy Plant Environment.

Microbiological hazards can occur when foodstuffs come into contact with contaminated surfaces or infectious agents dispersed by air currents in the manufacturing environment. An environmental monitoring program (EMP) is a critical aspect of sustainable and safe food manufacturing used to evaluate the effectiveness of the microbial controls in place. An effective EMP should be based on risk analysis, taking into account previous sampling history to determine the selection of the sampling points, the scope of the test, and the frequency of analysis.

Small molecule PGC-1α1 protein stabilizers induce adipocyte Ucp1 expression and uncoupled mitochondrial respiration.

Objective: The peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-γ coactivator-1α1 (PGC-1α1) regulates genes involved in energy metabolism. Increasing adipose tissue energy expenditure through PGC-1α1 activation is potentially beneficial for systemic metabolism. Pharmacological PGC-1α1 activators could be valuable tools in the fight against obesity and metabolic disease.

Design of a bioactive small molecule that targets r(AUUCU) repeats in spinocerebellar ataxia 10.

RNA is an important target for chemical probes of function and lead therapeutics; however, it is difficult to target with small molecules. One approach to tackle this problem is to identify compounds that target RNA structures and utilize them to multivalently target RNA. Here we show that small molecules can be identified to selectively bind RNA base pairs by probing a library of RNA-focused small molecules.