Physics Professor Loren Hough Awarded MIRA, Develops a New Way to Look at Cellular Shapeshifter Tubulin

Anonymous — Fri, 21 Oct 2016 23:19:17 +0000

Physics Professor Loren Hough Awarded MIRA, Develops a New Way to Look at Cellular Shapeshifter Tubulin Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 10/21/2016 - 17:19

Congratulations to Assistant Professor Loren Hough, who was recently awarded a New Investigator Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) from the National Institutes of Health this year to further vital research in the field of biophysics, specifically on studying the behavior of tubulin in his lab.

Tubulin, a protein found in your cells, quietly lends itself to many life processes. It sorts itself into long chains, forming tubes that provide scaffolding for living cells. A versatile shapeshifter, tubulin can arrange itself into different structures during different types of cell behavior. Tubulin gained prominence for medical applications when Taxol, a chemical first found in the bark of the Pacific Yew tree, was developed as a treatment for ovarian, breast and lung cancers. Taxol binds to tubulin and makes it hard for the tubes to grow and shrink, preventing cancer cells from proliferating.

“Tubulin is one molecule that does many things in cells,” says Hough, a member of the BioFrontiers Institute. “We're trying to understand how tubulin can play so many different roles."

Hough is focused on the ends of tubulin molecules, called the C-terminal tails. These tails coat the surfaces of the microtubules formed by tubulin. He is studying, in part, how much influence these tails exert on tubulin and its behavior. To answer some of the mysteries of tubulin, Hough developed a method to probe the C-terminal tails of tubulin using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, or NMR.

Hough wanted to measure how tubulin C-terminal tails influence cellular processes, but to do NMR he had to figure out how to get specific atoms into them first, as part of the isotopic labeling process. These atoms are easy to incorporate into bacteria, but tubulin cannot be made in bacteria because bacteria lack the suite of proteins that help tubulin fold into its correct shape. Hough brought in a helper: Tetrahymena thermophila. This small but mighty protozoan is common in freshwater ponds and is used frequently as a model organism in biological research. As it turns out, bacteria are a favorite snack of Tetrahymena, so Hough incorporated the isotopes into the bacteria, which were then devoured by the Tetrahymena. With the isotopes digested by the Tetrahymena, Hough was at last able to see the C-terminal tails in action using NMR, as described in a paper recently published in ACS Chemical Biology.

“There is beautiful physics regarding tubulin in general,” says Hough. “I thought the C-terminal tails might be affecting what we know about tubulin from a biophysical perspective. We think tubulin tails are like a knob the cell uses to control different features, but we don't know how the tails are used for this tuning. It’s exciting to be tackling these questions.”

The MIRA grant, from the National Institute of General Medical Science, is meant to support the work of young faculty. Hough’s $1.8 million MIRA grant will run five years.

“The MIRA is great. It’s going to give our lab the ability to push this project forward, as well as other research on disordered proteins,” says Hough. “We’re looking forward to taking this work on tubulin C-terminal tails even further over the next five years.”

The Hough lab is part of the physics department's Biophysics group. At the University of Colorado BioFrontiers Institute, researchers from the life sciences, physical sciences, computer science and engineering are working together to uncover new knowledge at the frontiers of science and partnering with industry to make their discoveries relevant.

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CU-��«��Ƶ’s IQ Biology Program wins NSF IGERT Grant

Anonymous — Wed, 13 Jun 2012 02:38:00 +0000

CU-��«��Ƶ’s IQ Biology Program wins NSF IGERT Grant Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 06/12/2012 - 20:38

Congratulations to the BioFrontiers Institute's Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology Program for earning a $3 Million IGERT Grant from the National Science Foundation. The award was announced on Thursday, June 7th.

According to their website, Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) is the National Science Foundation's flagship interdisciplinary training program, educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers by building on the foundations of their disciplinary knowledge with interdisciplinary training. The IQ Biology Program was one of three institutes in Colorado to be awarded an IGERT Grant this year.

"It's great news for the physics department and the biophysics program here to be recognized with funding to support interdisciplinary education in quantitative biology and biophysics," Associate Professor and BioFrontiers Task Force member Meredith Betterton said.

The IQ Biology Program incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to graduate education. Participating students earn a Ph.D. in one of eight academic departments-including the Department of Physics-while immersed in an "interdisciplinary culture" designed to provide a diverse education in other fields. Dr. Betterton serves as Co-Principal Investigator to the program.

"One of the recognized national research needs is to recruit and support students with physical science backgrounds doing research in the biological sciences," Betterton said. "This IGERT funding will help support students from a range of backgrounds who want to work in interdisciplinary areas of biology. The funding will be particularly valuable to students with physics backgrounds who want to work in biophysics and need to improve their understanding of biology to do research in this area."

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Physics Professor Loren Hough Awarded MIRA, Develops a New Way to Look at Cellular Shapeshifter Tubulin

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CU-��«����Ƶ’s IQ Biology Program wins NSF IGERT Grant

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CU-��«��Ƶ’s IQ Biology Program wins NSF IGERT Grant