Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences recently published five articles from the WSU Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. "PNAS is one of the leading journals in the world," said Barry P. Rosen, Ph.D., professor and chairman of the department. "To have articles by four BMB faculty in a short time demonstrates the high quality of research conducted in this department." Papers included:

• Jie Qin, Barry P. Rosen , Yang Zhang, Gejiao Wang, Sylvia Franke, and Christopher Rensing. Arsenic detoxification and evolution of trimethylarsine gas by a microbial arsenite S-adenosylmethionine methyltransferase. PNAS 103:2075-2080(2006).
• Samy O. Meroueh, Krisztina Z. Bencze, Dusan Hesek, Mijoon Lee, Jed F. Fisher, Timothy L. Stemmler , and Shahriar Mobashery. Three-dimensional structure of the bacterial cell wall peptidoglycan. PNAS 103:4404-4409(2006).
• Robert M. Johnson , Tom Prychitko, Deborah Gumucio, Derek E. Wildman, Monica Uddin, and Morris Goodman. Phylogenetic comparisons suggest that distance from the locus control region guides developmental expression of primate alpha-type globin genes. PNAS 103:3186-3191(2006).
• Serge N. Vinogradov , David Hoogewijs, Xavier Bailly, Raúl Arredondo-Peter, Michel Guertin, Julian Gough, Sylvia Dewilde, Luc Moens, and Jacques R. Vanfleteren. Three globin lineages belonging to two structural classes in genomes from the three kingdoms of life. PNAS 102:11385-11389(2005).
• Om Parkash Dhankher, Barry P. Rosen, Elizabeth C. McKinney and Richard B. Meagher. Hyperaccumulation of arsenic in the shoots of Arabidopsis silenced for arsenate reductase 2 (ACR2). PNAS in press (2006).