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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES 9 suffered great struggles created by sexist ideologies. As cabarets fell in popularity during the 1990s, these women became unfamiliar to a younger generation. “Film in the 1970s was at a low point,” she says. “There were a lot of raunchy movies and sexy comedies. There wasn’t much good cinema coming out of Mexico. It was fast, cheap sex, and these women were part of it. But if you mention these women in Mexico, people know who they are. It’s part of the popular culture.” Her research takes her to Mexican film festivals such as Ambulante, which is committed to supporting and promoting documentary film as a tool for social and cultural change. There, she interviews directors and producers— and, occasionally, these showgirls. “When I’m at the film festivals, sometimes I am invited to directors’ homes, where they share material with me that didn’t make it into the film. It’s very hands on. It’s not what people normally think of archives, where you put these gloves on and see these old books,” she says. “My work requires that I go to the festivals because the work is contemporary.” Pérez Limón expected to travel to Mexico last summer to conduct archival research, but COVID-19 altered her plans. Though she’s been forced to operate close to home, she still conducts research. From her assessments, she’s discovered a group of women who found love and joy in a sphere that was overtly sexist and went on to gracious afterlives. CHEMISTRY BACTERIAL PROTEINS Bacteria, whether good or bad, influence health in many ways. Although several thousands of bacterial genomes have been sequenced, little is known about many of the proteins they encode. Biochemist Oriana Fisher explores some of these poorly understand proteins to gain greater insight into them and their biological functions. “There’s incredibly little we know about bacterial biochemistry in general,” says Fisher, assistant professor of chemistry. “Many of these proteins likely do very important things, and we need to learn more about them.” Bacteria can respond to their environment using signal transduction pathways that lead to the regulation of sets of genes by transcription factors, she adds. These pathways are comprised of many different proteins and enzymes that collaborate to deliver signals from the environment into the cell. It has been suggested that many such proteins from bacteria might be possible new drug targets, but at a molecular level, many of them remain mysterious. Fisher and her team investigate the inter- and intra-molecular interactions used to carry out these functions and to explore mechanisms by which such pathways could be inhibited. Some of the techniques Fisher and her team employ include biochemistry, biophysics, bioinorganic chemistry, bioinformatics and X-ray crystallography. Crystallography provides fine molecular details of proteins, and the Fisher group produces proteins in the lab and coax them to crystallize. They then send the crystals to a facility in Chicago, where researchers collect data from them. This information is then returned to Fisher and her team, who use the data to solve the three-dimensional structure of the protein molecule. Parallel to studying these proteins individually, Fisher also investigates how proteins interact with other bacterial proteins and enzymes. She envisions this will provide her with a clearer view of how signaling proteins function in their native environments and how they influence the lives of the organisms of which they are a part. Fisher and her lab staff also examine the structure, biochemistry and biological functions of new classes of copper chaperones and transporters. Copper is present in every living organism, and the element is an essential micronutrient for bacteria. It is an important cofactor for several key metabolic enzymes, but levels of this metal must be tightly controlled to mitigate toxicity. As such, copper also represents a key player in host-pathogen interactions, and copper has been recognized for centuries as an antimicrobial agent. “All the way back to the ancient Egyptians, people have understood there’s an antimicrobial effect that copper possesses,” she says. “We know there are proteins that remove copper from the cell, proteins that bring copper into the cell and a number of proteins that use copper- essential cofactors for key metabolic processes. One of the large areas where much more work needs to be done is how copper ions get inside bacterial cells.” A bacillus thuringiensis colony during sporulation. Wanda Seux, 2012.