麻豆传媒色情片

Award

Labeling lipids and playing piano

Jeremy Baskin won the 2020/2021 Walter Shaw Young Investigator Award in Lipids
John Arnst
Nov. 1, 2019

For , learning a new arrangement on the piano isn’t so different from tagging and tracking phospholipids.

Jeremy Baskin

“When you play the piano, and you want to learn a hard passage, you have to do it slowly. And you have to do it over and over again to get the muscle memory correct,” said Baskin, a professor at Cornell University’s Weill Institute for Cell and 麻豆传媒色情片 Biology and department of chemistry and chemical biology. “That’s a good preparation for laboratory research, where you often have to repeat experiments and change variables in order to get it to work just right.”

For about a decade of getting his work right, Baskin has been selected to receive the 麻豆传媒色情片 and 麻豆传媒色情片 Biology’s 2020/2021 Walter Shaw Young Investigator Award in Lipids.

He grew up in Montreal in a family with an artistic bent — both his parents are classical musicians, and his younger sister is now an actress. When he pursued chemistry as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he found relaxation and camaraderie among fellow musicians.

“It being MIT, it wasn’t populated with a bunch of future professional musicians,” he said. “There was a lot of energy and focus on science and engineering majors that were doing music on the side.”

In 2004, Baskin joined  lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where he began developing chemical tools for imaging cell-surface glycans. In 2009, he took a postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of  at Yale University, where he narrowed his focus on membrane biology and lipid metabolism.

Baskin’s lab primarily focuses on two types of phospholipids that represent extremes in terms of size: phosphatidic acids, which have tiny headgroups, and phosphoinositides, which have massive headgroups. The lab recently has been focusing on phospholipase D, a precursor to several cancer-associated phosphatidic acids that often is upregulated in cancer.

Studying in a rich playground

Jeremy BaskinJeremy Baskin’s lab at Cornell University constantly is working on new tools to interrogate phospholipase D, an enzyme upregulated in a wide swath of cancers.

“There’s a push in other academic laboratories to develop selective inhibitors of phospholipase D for the purpose of downregulating the proliferation of cells, which is a hallmark of cancer,” Baskin said. “In the phosphatidic acid area, we’ve really focused much of our energy on the development of tools.”

In his award lecture at the 2020 ASBMB annual meeting, Baskin will speak about recently developed lipid imaging methods.

“These enzymes are, I think, a really rich playground for a chemical biologist to operate in, because they have a relaxed specificity that it allows us to come in with synthetic probes and trick the enzyme into accepting our synthetic probes instead of their natural substrates. And that is the key that allows us to develop our imaging tools,” Baskin said.

“We’re currently using them to uncover how the phospholipase D enzymes and the phosphatidic acid lipids that they produce regulate fundamental cell signaling and disease-associated signaling.”

Enjoy reading ASBMB Today?

Become a member to receive the print edition four times a year and the digital edition monthly.

Learn more
John Arnst

John Arnst was a science writer for ASBMB Today.

Get the latest from ASBMB Today

Enter your email address, and we鈥檒l send you a weekly email with recent articles, interviews and more.

Latest in People

People highlights or most popular articles

Meet the 2025 SOC grant awardees
Outreach

Meet the 2025 SOC grant awardees

Aug. 15, 2025

Five science outreach and communication projects received up to $1,000 from ASBMB to promote the understanding of molecular life science.

Unraveling cancer鈥檚 spaghetti proteins
Profile

Unraveling cancer鈥檚 spaghetti proteins

Aug. 13, 2025

MOSAIC scholar Katie Dunleavy investigates how Aurora kinase A shields oncogene c-MYC from degradation, using cutting-edge techniques to uncover new strategies targeting 鈥渦ndruggable鈥 molecules.

How HCMV hijacks host cells 鈥 and beyond
Profile

How HCMV hijacks host cells 鈥 and beyond

Aug. 12, 2025

Ileana Cristea, an ASBMB Breakthroughs webinar speaker, presented her research on how viruses reprogram cell structure and metabolism to enhance infection and how these mechanisms might link viral infections to cancer and other diseases.

Understanding the lipid link to gene expression in the nucleus
Profile

Understanding the lipid link to gene expression in the nucleus

Aug. 11, 2025

Ray Blind, an ASBMB Breakthroughs speaker, presented his research on how lipids and sugars in the cell nucleus are involved in signaling and gene expression and how these pathways could be targeted to identify therapeutics for diseases like cancer.

In memoriam: William S. Sly
In Memoriam

In memoriam: William S. Sly

Aug. 11, 2025

He served on the 麻豆传媒色情片 and 麻豆传媒色情片 Biology Council in 2005 and 2006 and was an ASBMB member for 35 years.

ASBMB committees welcome new members
Society News

ASBMB committees welcome new members

Aug. 7, 2025

Members joined these committees: Education and Professional Development, Maximizing Access, Meetings, 麻豆传媒色情片, Public Affairs Advisory, Science Outreach and Communication, Student Chapters and Women in Biochemistry and 麻豆传媒色情片 Biology.