August 06, 2019

Laura has been globe trotting again and making new friends! Her travel included:

MSACL- April 

Cal Poly Pomona - May

Fukushima University Agriculture Science, Japan - May 

MS Society of Japan, Tsukuba - May

Seoul National University - May

Korea Basic Science Institute - May  

ASMS - June 

ISCE - June 

ASM Microbe - June

ASP - July 

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July 31, 2019

Our NIGMS Equipment supplement on 3R01GM125943-02S2  was awarded. This will help towards the purchase of a new UPLC-qTOF mass spectrometer to expand our abilities to identify known unknowns from microbial extracts! STOKED! 

July 31, 2019

Our invited review for the special issue 'New methods for isolation and structure determination of natural products' hits the web. We are very excited have covered different ionization methods for various aspects of natural products discovery, we hope the discussion of the advantages, limitations and examples will be helpful to the broader NP community! 

July 23, 2019

Laura is one of Halo Cures, Inc 40 under 40 scientists in Chicago! 

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From developing hydrogels for faster wound healing to identifying a new biomarker for neuroblastoma, these forty scientists represent the next generation of big shoulder Chicago scientists working to translate innovation into application, from bench to bedside. Like most of science, those who ultimately benefit from their efforts may still be generations away.

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July 16, 2019

Katherine received her NOA today for her NIH NCI F31! Her proposal was scored in the 12th percentile and will support her continued collaboration with the Burdette lab to continue to adapt our imaging mass spectrometry platform to other secondary metastasis models for ovarian cancer as well as identify Factor X! Stayed tuned to watch her progress! 

July 16, 2019

Hopefully you caught Alanna's awesome talk at the Younger Members Symposium at the ASP meeting. She was selected for the David Slatkin Symposium which also came with an award to present her collaborative research with bile acids and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. 

June 10, 2019

Following her poster presentation at the ASMS annual meeting, Melissa will be heading off for a 12 week internship at Genentech with Dr. Sarah Robinson as her co-mentor for the summer. We are sad to see Melissa leave us for the summer but excited for the professional development and industry exposure she will be getting all summer! 

June 05, 2019

Well done Katherine for being selected to participate in the inaugural class of ASP Ambassadors. The ASP ambassadors are dynamic leaders who work with their peers to promote networking and collaboration, make connections between ASP and local universities, address the needs of young scientists by utilizing ASP resources, and instill a passion for natural products in the next generation. This initial appointment is for 3 years and will include funds to help promote the ASP at meetings targeted to URM STEM students. 

June 01, 2019

Gordon and Cynthia co-authored a review for an invited submission to FEMS Microbiology Letters. This article accompanies the talk Dr. Sanchez gave at the annual meeting on MS for industrial microbiology. 

May 03, 2019

Itzel, a L@S Ganas fellow, continues to excel. She was award an American Society of Pharmacognosy (ASP) undergraduate research award which will support her stipend in the 2019-2020 academic year for her capstone thesis. She was awarded an American Society for Microbiology (ASM) summer fellowship, but had to decline to accept a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at Scripps Institute of Oceanography (SIO) in Paul Jensen's lab. Way to go Itzel, we are so proud of your efforts in and out of the lab! #crushing 

April 05, 2019

Our Scialog collaborative proposal with the Su Lab (Univeristy of Arizona) was selected for funding by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement!  

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Dr Sanchez is currently a Scialog Fellow for the Chemical Machinery of the Cell. This Scialog is based on the conviction that the time is right to bring together chemists and biologists to spark collaborations and develop interdisciplinary projects that will catapult us to a deeper understanding of chemical machinery and reactions in the intact cell. 

April 13, 2019

Katherine and Alanna present their research orally at MIKIW 2019 in Lawrence, Kansas. 

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Alanna was awarded a presenters award for her excellent delivery of her research, but basically they were both winners on behalf of MCP. This would have made Dr. Judy Bolton very happy to see the department represented with class, style, and rigorous science. 

April 03, 2019

We had two papers hit the web this week. Katherine's video protocol for our mammalian co-culture of cells with explants is published at the Journal of Visualized Experiments, the video can be found on our Research Page. 

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Jess and Gordon's python script 'BLANKA' hit the web with the Journal of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry. This was an invited submission for an issue on Emerging Investigators. We are honored to be include among this list.  'The goal of the Emerging Investigators focus is to showcase some of the exciting fundamental and interdisciplinary research that is being performed by a group of researchers who are still establishing their independent academic careers, but have already demonstrated their potential to make important contributions to their respective areas of research, and have the potential to become future leaders within the field. '

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March 04, 2019

Welcome to the lab Cynthia! She is joining us from Bill Baker's lab at USF. Look for more updates on her progress in the near future 

February 27, 2019

Gordon Luu joins the lab! He is coming from Taro Amagata's lab at SFSU, in fact we are even related on our Chemistry Tree via Phil Crews 

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Additionally, Gordon was awarded a Travel Fellowship to the May Institute for Computation and statistics for mass spectrometry and proteomics. Well done Gordon! 

February 22, 2019

Jess will be recognized at the 47th Annual Chancellor’s Student Service and Leadership Awards Ceremony for her work at the Boys and Girls club and her training of our fantastic undergrads Shilpa and Itzel. Service towards the next generation of biomedical researchers is very important to our lab :) 

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Alanna was selected to participate in ASBMB's Hill Day 2019! More pictures and updates to come after her trip to Capital Hill is completed. #ScienceAdvocacy

February 22, 2019

Katherine has received both a Graduate College Student Presenters Award and a Graduate Student Council Travel Award. This helped support her travel and attendance to OurCON in November to present her work with imaging mass spectrometry and ovarian cancer. 

February 01, 2019

Jess was awarded a T32 fellowship in PSci's 'Research Training in Natural Product Complementary and Integrative Medicine'. This is funded by the Office of the Director (OD and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) of the NIH, the main scope of this grant is to train the next generation of scientists to have the knowledge and skills required for the discovery of new therapeutic agents from natural product sources and the establishment of safety and efficacy of widely used dietary supplements and natural product-derived drugs. Way to go Jess! 

January 19, 2019

Melissa is seriously on a roll this year! 

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• She was awarded a MSACL 2019 US Young Investigator Educational Grant and also will be giving a podium talk

• She was awarded the Al R Langerman Memorial Scholarship at COP Research Day 2019

• She got a 1st place poster award in the Clinical, Social, and Applied Sciences Category at COP Research Day 2019 

• Her work in outreach will be recognized at the 47th Annual Chancellor’s Student Service and Leadership Awards  Ceremony

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November 30, 2018

Melissa was awarded a Provost’s Graduate Research Award by the Graduate College for her proposal on the “Development of Mass Spectrometry Methods and Statistical Analysis Tools for Early Detection of Ovarian Cancer.” 

November 17, 2018

Itzel presented her NSF funded research project at ABRCMS in Indianapolis. She did a great job presenting her poster and her work was recognized with a poster award in the Microbiology section. Way to go Itzel! She has a bright future in research :) 

November 11, 2018

Laura has been to a lot of places this fall; OurCon in Charleston, SC was pretty darn fun - check the band's new album cover featuring the Cologna and Anderton labs. 

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UC Santa Cruz

Scialog - Chemical Machinery of the Cell (Tuscon, AZ)

University of Montreal

ABRCMS (Indianapolis, IN) 

OurCon (Charleston, SC)

Washington DC

October 30, 2018

Way to go Melissa, she is the brand new PhD candidate! Excited to see her work on women's health and mass spectrometry. 

October 23, 2018

What a week! Valya's first author paper hits the web today. This project was supported by both UIC BIRCWH and our CCTS Pilot Grant with the Burdette lab. Valya describes in what some reviewers say 'a well executed study' our use of MALDI-TOF spectra to discriminate two component cell mixtures. Stayed tuned for more complex model systems! 

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Check the paper out here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13361-018-2088-6#citeas

October 23, 2018

Well done Melissa on getting a Graduate College Student Presenters Award! This helps to cover the cost of attending ASMS in the summer where she presented an oral presentation on our NSF funded cheese collaboration with Rachel Dutton's lab. 

October 22, 2018

Jess was selected to receive a travel stipend award to the ASMS 2018 Fall Workshop on Metabolomics Informatics in San Francisco in Nov! Well done Jess and we are looking forward to applying these tools and techniques to our NSF cheese project with Rachel Dutton's lab!  

October 09, 2018

Our collaboration with the Burdette Lab to develop an imaging mass spectrometry platform to study mammalian cells and explant tissues hits the web today! Katherine and Dr Matt Dean developed the methodology and identified and validated norepienephrine as a key player in the communication between fallopean tubes and the ovary. Well done team! 

The article was also highlighted as an EurekAlert. See the story here. 

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There will also be a cover image coming shortly, so keep your eyes peeled for it! 

August 27, 2018

We have submitted an author summary video to go with Jess's latest mSystems manuscript. Check it out by clicking the picture or watching it on our Research page, worth watching all the way to the end ;)

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This is a nice summary of the lab's fist research paper check out our collaboration with the Wolfe lab here: https://msystems.asm.org/content/3/4/e00036-18

August 16, 2018

The Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology annual meeting was hosted in Chicago. UIC and the Sanchez lab had a strong showing. Both Zade and Jess presented posters on Monday night, Dr Sanchez gave a talk in 'Natural Products from Unusual Microorganisms' on Tuesday morning, and finally, Dr Sanchez co-chaired the session 'Characterizing Microbes and Microbial Interactions' with Dr Chris Anderton from PNNL.  

August 08, 2018

Our NIH R01 project in collaboration with the Murphy Lab and Isabel Cruz from Computer Science was awarded. This will support the digitization of microbes for the IDBac library, creation of a web GUI, and discovery from the existing organisms we have in both the Murphy Lab and Sanchez Lab. If you have microbes you want to add to the library send us an email! Information about the grant can be found here. 

August 02, 2018

For presenting your summer research at the COP summer mini symposium. Her poster was awarded a best poster presentation, which is especially awesome because she was out sick prior to the symposium. Her dedication, eagerness to learn and passion are always evident both in and out of the lab. 

July 25, 2018

Our proposal with Rachel Dutton's lab at UCSD was awarded by the NSF! This award will support our investigations of microbial communities on cheese rinds as well as design a compenent to incorporate fermented food education to kids at the Near West Sci Boys and Girls Club! Information about the award can be found here. 

July 20, 2018

The 3rd annual Chicago Mass Spec was another success. Our keynote speaker was Dr Theresa Evans Nguyen from University of South Florida. We had five student/postdoc talks and this year a career panel and lunch and learn sessions were added. Melissa was the student chair of the event and did a heroic job raising funds for the meeting and organizing a great day! 

June 07, 2018

Well done Melissa for delivering a talk at ASMS, Her talk was in the Food Safety and Chemistry ThOC session. This was her first talk at a national meeting and she rocked it! 

May 15, 2018

Laura has been selected as a 2018 Scialog Fellow by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement in collaboration with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Fellows are selected based on their promise as early to mid-career investigators working on the chemistry or biology of the cell. Scialog fellows with participate in the 2018 Scialog: Chemical Machinery of the Cell, where they will will form teams of Fellows to write collaborative proposals to seed highly innovative ideas that emerge from the dialog! 

May 10, 2018

Well done on your presentation at SMComm today Melissa. I could not be prouder that you wowed us with science while sipping on some fine wine. Cheese research should always be consumed with an adult beverage! Look for a mass spec focused talk on this project next month at ASMS in San Diego, Melissa will be presenting on Thursday Afternoon in the session entitled "Food Safety & Chemistry: Foodomics, Allergens, Bacteria, Foods" #ASMS2018

May 09, 2018

Zade graduates from UIC and completes his Capstone Thesis for the honors college. Best of luck on your journey following UIC. Again look for Zade at his poster at SIMB this summer in Chicago. 

May 14, 2018

Katherine is awarded a UIC Graduate College Student Presenters Award that supported her travel to the Marine Natural Product Gordon Research Conference in March. 

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Katherine is awarded a poster award at this year's Perlman Symposium on Antibiotic Discovery and Development. Her poster featured our collaborative project with the Mandel lab now also at UW Madison. #squidsquad

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Katherine's undergraduate mentees nominated her for an Undergraduate Mentoring Award and she is awarded an Honorable Mention for her dedication to their education in the lab. Mentorship of the next generation of biomedical researchers is an essential contribution to science and most of us would not be here without someone else taking the time to foster and mentor our own careers. Well Done! 

May 03, 2018

Well done Jess on passing your qualifying exam like a boss today! Jess will be focusing on expanding our understanding of cheese-derived microbial interactions and trying to link these to production on real cheeses. She uses both bacteria and fungi in co-cultures in collaboration with Rachel Dutton's lab at UCSD and Ben Wolfe's lab at Tufts. 

April 23, 2018

In collaboration with the Murphy lab, we aimed to innovate the front end of microbial based natural product drug discovery. This means rather than picking bacteria based on your favorite color or a whim from an isolation plate, you can take a snap shot of the phylogeny based on a protein fingerprint and the small molecule production potential within the existing phylogeny. This method is cheap and quick and the paper is open access! Get ready Microbe Hunters! 

April 19, 2018

Katherine was honored with a UIC Chancellor's Student Service and Leadership Award for her work with the Junior League, Boys and Girls Club, Expanding Your Horizons, and her mentorship of undergraduate researchers in the lab. 

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Katherine's first research publication hits the web at Microbiology. This was a fun collaboration with the Dietrich lab entitled, "Pseudomonas aeruginosa PumA acts on an endogenous phenazine to promote self-resistance"

April 12, 2018

for presenting research posters at the UIC Research Forum. Sindhu was awarded a 1st place poster award in the Business/Computer Science/ Mathematics + Engineering/Physical Sciences category for her poster entitlte, "Chemical Interactions between Zebrafish Native Gut Bacteria and Vibrio cholerae" 

March 28, 2018

because she has secured a summer internship at Genentech in South San Francisco. We know the city by the Bay will be an exciting journey into industrial science this summer ! 

March 05, 2018

for being awarded an Honors College travel grant to attend the Society for Industrial Microbiology and Biotechnology (SIMB) annual meeting in Chicago in August! Zade's abstract was also selected for a poster presentation, so be on the look out for him at the conference! 

February 20, 2018

for receiving a UIC Graduate College Student Presenters Award. This award help cover the costs associated with Alanna's attendance to ASM Vibrio last fall! 

February 13, 2018

For being accepted to the May Institute on "Computation and statistics for mass spectrometry and proteomics" at Northeastern University and receiving a travel fellowship! This program will help Melissa interpret and analyze data for our CCTS pilot grant on using mass spectrometry to study women's health. 

February 09, 2018

Five posters from the Sanchez lab were on display at COP Research Day 2018, well done to Katherine and Alanna for winning the following poster awards:

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Controlled Release Society (CRS) Student Chapter Choice Award

Katherine E Zink, Matt Dean, Joanna E Burdette, Laura M Sanchez, "Developing a Novel Imaging Mass Spectrometry Method to Detect Chemical Communication Driving Metastasis in Ovarian Cancer"

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Chemistry: Discovery, Modeling, Design & Evaluation of Novel Drugs; Detection & Delivery Systems

Second prize: Horizon Award for Excellence in Research

Alanna Condren, Lisa Kahl, Lars Dietrich, Laura Sanchez, "Bile Acid Exposure Alters Specialized Metabolism Leading to Biofilm Inhibition in Pseudomonas aeruginosa"

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January 05, 2018

Katherine's abstract was selected for an oral presentation at the upcoming 2018 Marine Natural Product Gordon Research Seminar which immediately precedes the Conference in Ventura, CA. 

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Alanna receives a SACNAS/ACS travel award to the Fall 2018 ACS Natl Meeting in Boston, MA. 

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Jess is selected for an Edward Benes Scholarship at Research Day! 

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Dr Sanchez's proposal is awarded the 2018 Vahlteich Research Award and will be recognized on Feb 9, 2018 at COP Research Day. 

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