An outstanding scientist, director of the IBCh RAS, winner of many awards, professor, academician Vadim Tikhonovich Ivanov has passed away on Friday, 8 April 2022.

An outstanding scientist, a laureate of Rosenstiel Award (1988) and Nobel prize in chemistry (1989), Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University and a member of the International Advisory Board of the IBCh RAS, Sidney Altman passed away on April 5, 2022 at the age of 82. He made a fundamental contribution to the biological and medical sciences. The staff and administration of the IBCh RAS express their sincere condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Sidney Altman.

Being targeted to tumor cells, genetically-encoded NanoLuc-miniSOG construct generates internal light source and sensitizer pair, which makes possible PDT effect under BRET activation to treat tumors at virtually unlimited depth.

Traditionally, cytogenetic and molecular cytogenetic methods are used to detect chromosomal abnormalities. With the development of sequencing technologies, new approaches have become available to identify structural variations ranging from 50 bp. Researchers from the Laboratory of Molecular Oncology of Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Federal Research and Clinical Center of Physical-Chemical Medicine of Federal Medical Biological Agency developed an approach for construction of CNV validation set at the exon level and evaluated the efficiency of CNV calling tools designed for whole exome sequencing data.

Scientists from the Group of molecular tools for living system studies and Laboratory of molecular diagnostics (IBCH) together with the colleagues from Skoltech, the Federal Research Center for Physical and Chemical Medicine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA) and Instituto de Química-Física Rocasolano (Spain) has developed a DNA modification, 7,8-dihydro-8-oxo-1,N6-ethenoadenine (oxo-ϵA), a non-natural synthetic base that combines structural features of two naturally occurring DNA lesions (7,8-dihydro-8-oxoadenine and 1,N6-ethenoadenine).

Since the beginning of HIV epidemic, lasting more than 30 years, the main goal of scientists was to develop effective methods for the prevention and treatment of HIV infection, including the search for new compounds with high activity against HIV. Studies carried out by the staff of the Department of Molecular Neuroimmune Signaling of the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Gamaleya National Research Center for Epidemiology and Microbiology showed that phospholipases A2 (PLA2) from snake venom have a pronounced anti-HIV effect.

The team from the Department of metabolism and redox biology together with Russian and foreign colleagues from Belgium and France, has developed a new analytical tool that allows registering (pseudo)hypohalous stress in living systems at subcellular resolution in real-time mode. The indicator was characterized in detail in vitro, and the spatial structure of a redox sensor based on a circularly permuted fluorescent protein was established for the first time. The resulting instrument was used to visualize the dynamics of active halogen species in the model of inflammation caused by the amputation of Danio rerio caudal fin. The work was published in Nature Communications journal (IF 14.919).

Embryos of many organisms are able to maintain the invariance of their structure, regardless of size – the so-called phenomenon of embryonic scaling. For example, embryos of sea urchin or frog, which have developed from individual cells isolated shortly after the beginning of egg cleavage, self-regulate their structure so that they appear as smaller copies of normal ones. Researchers at the Laboratory of Molecular Bases of Embryogenesis at the IBCH RAS have proposed a general approach to the study of the mechanisms of embryonic scaling. They heuristically postulated and then mathematically proved the existence of special genes, named scalers, the expression of which depends on the embryo size, developed a method for targeted search of such genes, and, as proof of principle, disclose the mechanism by means of which one of the found scalers, mmp3, regulates patterning of Xenopus laevis embryo in a size-dependent manner.

Determination of the pH value in living cells and tissues is of great importance in physiology and cell biology. Researchers from the Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry, Russian Academy of Sciences, from the Laboratory of Receptor Cell Biology, Laboratory of Molecular Theranostics and the Group of Molecular Physiology, together with colleagues from the I Prokhorov General Physics Institute and Moscow State University, a genetically encoded fluorescent sensor for measuring the pH of the extracellular medium in the slightly alkaline range has been created.