Laurie lab receives new NIH R01 grant

Microbial infection of the eye can lead to ulceration, a precursor to blindness. This new R01 works out the mechanism(s) by which cleavage of ‘lacritin’, a natural human tear protein, releases a potent bactericidal peptide that helps protects the eye from microbial infection. The Laurie lab first published on this activity in the Journal of Biological Chemistry 289(32):22172-22182 (2014) entitled ‘A cleavage-potentiated fragment of tear lacritin is bactericidal’. Lacritin was discovered by the lab out of an unbiased screen for factors that regulate basal tearing. Other tear proteins (over 1500) have multiple functions’.