The Southern California Environmental Health Sciences Center (SCEHSC) has received an $8 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to advance research on the health effects of environmental exposures. SCEHSC, which is based at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and has been continuously funded by NIH for more than 30 years. The center has supported research on air pollution that has been highly influential in development of regulatory standards, on extreme heat and wildfires, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and on environmental effects on cardiorespiratory health, neurodevelopment and cognitive aging, kidney, liver and metabolic disease, and diabetes. The new grant ensures the center can continue backing these and other efforts through pilot funding, service cores providing expertise in exposure assessment, study design, biostatistics and data science, community engagement, research translation and science communication, and additional resources. Central to SCEHSC’s impact is its pilot program, which provides funding and support to help investigators turn promising ideas into established research programs. The program has generated a 30-to-1 return on its investments, with pilot funding helping researchers attract additional support, primarily from NIH. The new NIH funding will also allow SCEHSC to expand its work in two new areas in environmental health: artificial intelligence (AI) and cancer. SCEHSC is also expanding its work on environmental exposures linked to cancer in children and adults, in collaboration with the USC Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center.

A protein that’s essential to every cell’s ability to turn off unnecessary genes is well known for its key function of compacting genes and its connection to cancer when it undergoes mutation. But until now, scientists weren’t quite sure how the protein gets where it needs to go to keep genes bound up so they aren’t activated. In a new study, researchers found that this protein, called linker histone H1, initially flits around inside a cell with no clear aim even in the presence of its target: a nucleosome containing spooled-up segments of DNA. H1 binds directly to two DNA strands sticking out from the nucleosome, but struggles to bind to the nucleosome itself until a chaperone protein escorts it there.

Eating sweets while taking antibiotics may worsen the harm done by the drugs to the normal community of bacteria in the gut, a new study found.