School Notes: School of Medicine
November/December 2010

A year after her death, new fellowships memorialize Annie Le

When Annie Marie Le, an idealistic and ambitious doctoral student in Yale’s Combined Program in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS), lost her life in a homicide last September, the Yale community—and the larger world—reacted with grief and dismay. In the wake of Le’s death, members of the Yale community came together to forge a scholarship fund that would commemorate her life and exemplary spirit in a lasting way by supporting the work of current graduate students. Two graduate students in the BBS program—Julie Button, a fifth-year graduate student in microbiology; and Jason Wallace, a fourth-year graduate student in molecular, cellular, and developmental biology—were named the first Annie Le Fellows and are receiving funding for the 2010–2011 academic year. Button works in the laboratory of Salmonella expert Jorge E. Galán, the Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis. Wallace is a doctoral student in the lab of Ronald R. Breaker, the Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. The Annie Le Fellowship will be awarded each year by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, at the recommendation of faculty in the biological and biomedical sciences.

Child psychiatrist decodes Tourette’s

Best known for triggering symptoms of hay fever, histamine also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain. A new genetic study led by Matthew W. State, the Donald J. Cohen Associate Professor of Child Psychiatry, suggests that histamine plays a role in Tourette’s syndrome. As reported in the May 20 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine,in a rare family in which the father and all eight children, but not the mother, have Tourette’s, affected family members all carried the same mutation in HDC, a gene involved in histamine synthesis. Normally, HDC molecules pair up in a symmetrical complex to synthesize histamine. The mutation, which truncates the HDC protein, is found on only one of two chromosomes, and inhibits the enzymatic activity of the normal copy by forming an abnormal complex. Histamine-boosting drugs reduce Tourette’s-like behaviors in mice lacking HDC, and several are in human clinical trials for neuropsychiatric conditions, says State, also co-director of the Yale Neurogenetics Program. “This may mean that we have the opportunity to go directly from a rare genetic finding to a trial of a new approach to treatment. In our field, that would be very unusual, and very exciting,” he says.