Family Pride

Just want to bump this post about my first cousin's achievement in the United States.
"Mae Nillos was selected for the best student poster presentation, and Mary Ann Rempel won best student platform presentation at the recent meeting of the Southern California SETAC chapter. The conference was held on April 9-10 at Lake Arrowhead. Mae and Mary Ann beat out students from UCLA, UC Berkeley, Cal State Long Beach, and Loyola Marymount for the awards. Mae's poster was titled "Investigation of the enantioselective endocrine disruption effects of synthetic pyrethroids." Mary Ann's talk was titled "Uptake of estradiol from sediment by hornyhead turbot (Pleurnichthys verticalis) and effects on oxidative DNA damage in male gonads."

Congratulations to both Mae and Mary Ann for their excellent work." Taken from this link.

My cousin Mae finished her bachelor in science major in Chemistry in the University of the Philippines in 1996 and took her Masters in Ecotoxicology at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia in 2002. She is now affiliated with University of California Riverside in the Environmental Toxicology Department. Way to go, couz!

Here's a synopsis of the research she was into. (By the way, she once sent me an email while she was doing her experiment in her lab.)

"A large number of organophosphorous insecticides (OPs) are chiral compounds, and yet enantioselectivity in their environmental fate and effects is rarely addressed. In the present study, we isolated individual enantiomers of three OPs, profenofos, fonofos, and crotoxyphos, and evaluated enantioselectivity in their inhibition of acetylcholinesterase (AChE). Acetylcholinesterase inhibition by the enantiomers and racemates was determined in vivo in the aquatic invertebrate Daphnia magna and in Japanese medaka (Oryzias latipes) as well as in vitro with electric eel (Electrophorus electricus) and human recombinant AChEs. The overall results showed variable sensitivity between AChE enzymes from different species as well as variable magnitude of enantioselectivity in enzyme inhibition. The (-)-enantiomer of profenofos was 4.3- to 8.5-fold more inhibitory to AChE in vivo, whereas (-)-fonofos was 2.3- to 29-fold more potent than the corresponding (+)-enantiomer. The (+)-enantiomer of crotoxyphos was 1.1- to 11-fold more inhibitory to AChE than the (-)-enantiomer. In contrast, the in vitro results showed (+)-profenofos to be 2.6- to 71.8-fold more inhibitory than the (-)-enantiomer and (-)-crotoxyphos to be 1.6- to 1.9-fold more active than the (+)-enantiomer. The reversed direction of enantioselectivity observed between the in vivo and in vitro assays suggests enantioselectivity within toxicodynamic processes such as uptake, biotransformation, or elimination. Findings from the present study provide evidence of enantioselectivity in the AChE inhibition of chiral OPs in nontarget organisms and indicate the need to consider enantiomers individually when assessing environmental risk of these chiral pesticides."(link)