Search Results for: Lange

#IAmScience Margaret Lange

February 19, 2021 By Lauren Hines in #IAmScience Tags: vaccines, virology

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC

Building a community through screens and limited interaction can be difficult. However, it’s no problem for Margaret Lange at Bond Life Sciences Center.

“I’ve met such wonderful people,” Lange said. “It really is true that if you surround yourself with the right kind of people who are positive, who think creatively and who ask good questions, it shows you how to model that behavior yourself. It teaches you to be better and helps you think better.”

Lange was originally part of the Donald Burke lab until she became an assistant professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology in the School of Medicine and established her own lab in Sept 2019, getting her start in Bond LSC lab space. Even though March 2020 brought shutdowns and restrictions, Lange still found herself in a mentoring role.

“I’ve had some mentoring experience but never as the primary investigator (P.I.) of the lab, so it’s a new experience for me,” Lange said. “I’m learning from that and learning from them and, hopefully, they’re learning some things from me as well.”

Lange understands that establishing a lab requires equipment and published papers, but also a good team.

“The reason I joined her [lab] is that women in science in a leadership role is very important and that needs to be encouraged,” said Rachna Aneja Arora, research scientist in the Lange lab. “I see her as a good leader and a good mentor. She has a very inspirational role and can be a role model for the young girls and women in science to take on the challenging role to be a P.I.”

However, Lange’s path towards science began before she even arrived at Mizzou.

Growing up in rural Missouri, Lange attended a small high school that didn’t offer many science classes beyond the traditional chemistry and anatomy classes.

“I didn’t even know at that time that you could do research in a lab,” Lange said. “I had no idea what opportunities were available.”

She did have some knowledge of microbiology since her mother was a medical technologist at the local hospital where she spent time identifying microbes that were causing infections in patients. So, Lange decided to enroll in a microbiology class once she started college. Not too long after, the professor asked Lange to help her with her research.

“If it wasn’t for her, I never would have probably tried doing research at all,” Lange said. “It’s really fun to design experiments and to answer questions. And so that was really kind of where my love for that started to show, or at least become evident to me, anyway.”

Since then, Lange has been interested in how cells can sense viruses and how that shapes immune signaling.

Humans have many receptors that can recognize different parts of viruses and can cause different immune responses based on what they’re recognizing.

“We really try to understand what is working at the level of the virus to shape those responses and how that influences how our immune system is able to fight those viruses,” Lange said.

The Lange lab is currently looking to improve the host-virus interaction regarding vaccines.

Vaccines generate a response that is specific to a certain component of a virus. However, just focusing on a single protein or nucleic acid is not enough to generate a robust and specific immune response. So, researchers like Lange are working towards improving adjuvants — immunostimulants in vaccines — to create a stronger response that helps shape antibody and T cell responses.

“Investigating what types of nucleic acid motifs can actually bind and signal through these pattern recognition receptors helps us design better adjuvants that can better shape the immune response for a specific pathogen,” Lange said. “For example, if you use a nucleic acid from the SARS coronavirus, it might shape the immune response in a specific way targeted to that specific virus, and then you hopefully get a better efficacy for your vaccine.”

For now, Lange and her team are working towards developing their lab and getting manuscripts underway.

“I really admire her for all she’s doing,” Aneja Arora said. “I think we will work harder to get things moving forward. So, I just wish her all the best and wish her good luck setting up a very established lab.”

#IAmScience Reinier Suarez

February 18, 2022 By Penquite, Cara (MU-Student) in #IAmScience Tags: COVID-19, virology

By Cara Penquite | Bond LSC

When one of Reinier Suarez’s undergraduate professors suggested he go to graduate school, he was confused.

“I had never heard of a Ph.D. in my life,” Suarez said.

Three years later, Suarez is a first-year graduate student studying COVID-19 variants. Suarez came to Mizzou as part of the university’s Post-Baccalaureate Research Education Program (PREP), a stepping-stone between his undergraduate studies at Florida International University and his graduate studies at MU. He joined Marc Johnson’s lab at Bond Life Sciences Center as a PREP scholar and liked it enough to stay and continue his studies.

“Marc Johnson is a great [principle investigator], he really takes the time to talk to the students. He’s very honest,” Suarez said.

While Suarez started with HIV research, he soon switched his focus to coronaviruses when MU shut down at the beginning of the pandemic.

“[Johnson] saw it as a good opportunity to expand the lab, and I agreed,” Suarez said.

Suarez works on pseudotyped COVID-19 particles that allow him to study variants of COVID-19 without the dangers of using a live virus. Psudeotyped particles have the COVID-19 spike protein on the surface of the cell, but the virus genome is replaced with fluorescent proteins. Similar to a live virus, the pseudotyped particles can get inside healthy cells using the spike protein, but they release the fluorescent protein instead of the COVID-19 genome. A live COVID-19 virus would use the genome to hijack the cells and reproduce more virus, but the fluorescent protein in the pseudotyped particles only change the cell’s color under a microscope.

“If the [pseudotyped particles] infect a cell, the cells turn green … and then you can measure how much green there is in compared to all the cells that you have,” Suarez said.

By measuring the amount of green, Suarez measures how many cells were infected by the particles. Suarez uses this method to test different mutations of the COVID-19 spike protein to see which version increases infectivity.

Suarez also contributes to the lab’s other COVID-19 project testing wastewater samples from various locations in Missouri and around the U.S. to identify amounts of COVID-19 spike proteins in the water.

“You can actually see when a locality is about to hit an outbreak before they get there,” Suarez said.

As the only graduate student in the Johnson lab, Suarez has taken on greater research responsibilities as well as teaching undergraduates – a long way from his start in the lab as a PREP scholar.

As a PREP scholar, Suarez worked closely with Johnson to prepare for graduate school.

“It was clear that he had holes in his background which required chiseling,” Johnson said, but he also commended Suarez’s work ethic.

“His motivation has been second to none,” Johnson said.

As an undergraduate, Suarez studied at Florida International University where he pursued dentistry. Coming from Miami, it seemed like a natural step for Suarez.

“I started off with dentistry because I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I just knew I liked science, specifically biology,” Suarez said.

It was not until his last year of undergraduate studies that one of his professors suggested he look into grad school.

“I was taking her virology class and she said, ‘hey why don’t you go to grad school,’ and I was like ‘what is that, what is grad school,’” Suarez said.

Having no prior experience working in a laboratory proved an obstacle in the graduate program admissions process, but he was accepted to PREP which allowed him to improve his education and start research before attending a graduate program.

“The PREP program basically gives students the ability to see what grad school is like without having to be in grad school,” Suarez said.

During the PREP program Suarez rotated in various MU labs, but he credits much of his learning to Margaret Lange, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology assistant professor, and Johnson.

“[Lange’s] also an HIV researcher, so her and Marc Johnson work very close together,” Suarez said, “they kind of formed a co-mentorship.”

While Suarez experienced a “very nurturing environment” at MU, he still credits his decision to start research to his mentor during his undergraduate studies who suggested furthering his education.

“She set me on a path and that’s how I’m here today,” Suarez said.

#IAmScience Billy Schulze

October 1, 2021 By Lauren Hines in #IAmScience Tags: virology

By Lauren Hines | Bond LSC

The best piece of advice Ph.D. candidate Billy Schulze ever received was from his father before a baseball game in high school. In past games, Schulze kept striking out. He wasn’t getting any runs. Things seemed bleak.

Schulze’s father pulled him aside and said with a smile, “Don’t suck.”

“That just kind of made me giggle,” Schulze said. “I think the real message behind that story is don’t think about it too hard. Relax. Have some fun…You can’t take things too seriously, having a sense of humor is so important. Working hard and pushing through problems is vital, especially in science where failure is so common.”

Schulze has brought that mentality to his research in the Margaret Lange lab at Bond Life Sciences Center since he joined in 2019. Whether he’s working on innate immunity or becoming one of the first biomedical engineer graduates at Mizzou, Schulze understands balance is vital in and out of research.

Taking after his father, Schulze wanted to become an engineer. However, it didn’t quite tick all his boxes.

“I have always been fascinated with biology,” Schulze said. “I just distinctly remember being in eighth grade when we went out to the pond water behind my middle school and looked at the pond water with a microscope. Seeing all of the protozoa and stuff that are in the pond water was really cool to me, and that just kind of stuck with me.”

Schulze merged engineering and biology when he became one of the first four students to graduate from biomedical engineering in 2018.

Soon after going back for his Ph.D., Schulze founded the Molecular Pathogenesis and Therapeutics Graduate Student Organization (MPTGSO). It’s aimed at improving the MPT degree by facilitating student feedback to faculty.

“I think that’s the thing I’m most proud of that I’ve done here, just being president of [MPTGSO], founding that and really just trying to be a voice for the entire student body of the program to the faculty in an attempt to just make everybody’s lives better within the program,” Schulze said.

When not helping graduate students, Schulze is in the Lange lab studying viruses, the innate immune systems and what causes Toll-like receptors (TLRs) to activate. TLRs are a class of receptors that can recognize various structures and molecules to trigger an immune system response. The Lange lab focuses on nucleic acid detecting TLRs.

Schulze is using a piece of the poliovirus genome (PV-5) known to bind to these specific receptors to create an immune response to the virus. This allows him to see which receptors activate and why.

“We’re asking what specifically is in PV-5 that is activating the receptor,” Schulze said. “So as opposed to looking at the receptor from the amino acids and what amino acids are required for binding, we’re looking at the RNA, and what RNA structures and motifs are required for binding to TLR.”

The Lange lab is creating a library of RNA sequences based on the genetic information of PV-5 to find which receptors activate.

“In this pandemic-affected world, viruses are at the forefront of health right now, and it’s something that everybody’s thinking about, and we’re specifically looking at the host-virus interface, something that is not necessarily the best understood,” Schulze said. “But at the same time, if we can help to modulate the immune response to viruses, we can potentially have better…potential antiviral therapeutics.”

When Schulze joined Bond LSC in 2016 as part of the Marc Johnson lab, he still had to learn all basic bench skills. Johnson lab supervisor Terri Lyddon was the one who showed him the ropes.

“He was definitely a worthwhile undergraduate student to have in the lab,” Lyddon said. “He was dependable, and he liked the work and came in with a positive attitude every day.”

Lyddon remembers how Schulze was always the one to speak up in lab meetings and ask questions about anything from the lab equipment to why they used particular procedures.

“There are certain levels of enthusiasm and inquisitiveness that come with almost anybody that comes to the lab because you have to want to do this kind of work in the first place…but he brought it to the lab in a unique way,” Lyddon said. “He was curious, and while some others may be curious, they don’t go on to find out the answers to those questions.”

When Schulze’s time in the lab eventually ends, he hopes to move on to a biotechnology company he truly believes in. For now, he’ll be in the lab keeping his dad’s advice in the back of his mind.

“Frankly, I think [science] is a frustrating field to work in, but it is also one of the most rewarding fields for that reason because you’ve overcome so much to find what you found, to prove what you’ve proven,” Schulze said. “I think it’s really cool, but it does require a lot of persistence.”

Homegrown researcher

October 16, 2019 By Mariah Cox in Research Tags: Mizzou Research

Years at MU lands student turned faculty tenure-track position

Maggie Lange-Osborn is a newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology. | Photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC

By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

Where can passion, hard work and more than a decade worth of experience get you? They landed Maggie Lange-Osborn her own research lab on the University of Missouri campus.

Lange is starting down that path in Bond Life Sciences Center but will move to a permanent space in either the Medical Science Building or Schweitzer Hall eventually. She’s excited to spread her wings and establish herself independently of her past role in the Bond LSC.

In the meantime, she’s working arduously to build her lab from the ground up. From small materials such as plastics for cell culture, pipettes and pipette tips and chemicals to make buffers to large expensive equipment, Lange will eventually need it all.

“Walking into the lab, you don’t realize all of the things you need to do an experiment. When I walk into my lab space, I literally have nothing,” said Lange, a newly appointed assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology (MMI). “You have to think about all of those things, you know it’s not just the equipment it’s the pipettes, the incubators, the hoods and then also the materials to put in those things.”

Luckily with 10 plus years in the building, Lange knows of all of the shared resources available to her, so she doesn’t have to invest in many expensive machines just yet.

“I cannot wait to do my first experiment with my own equipment,” Lange said.

Lange began her career at MU in 2003 as a Ph.D. student in the Molecular Microbiology and Immunology and Veterinary Pathobiology Graduate Program, whether she knew it at the time or not.

When applying for faculty positions, Lange worried that she would be placed in a box, unable to separate herself from her graduate work if she stayed at MU. With time, she’s found that hasn’t been the case.

“Even though I’ve been here for so long, I’ve been able to surround myself with people who know more than me and who have different areas of expertise than I do,” Lange said. “I can still branch off and learn a lot from other researchers, which is what I found really attractive about Mizzou.”

Her segway into research occurred during her first year as a graduate student in an MMI lab in the School of Medicine. Under Michael Misfeldt at the School of Medicine, Lange studied pattern recognition receptors in the innate immune system, which is the body’s first line of defense against a virus or bacteria.

The specific receptor she worked with recognizes a component of viruses. From there, Lange wanted to understand how a host is able to respond.

“After working on that I felt like I had a really good grasp of the host response side and I wanted to get more of the virus side to understand virus replication and what types of replication mechanisms work to signal the host from that perspective,” Lange said.

That led Lange to join Bond LSC in 2008 as a post-doctoral researcher in Donald Burke’s lab. Known for specializing in HIV research and viral biology, the Burke lab gave Lange the opportunity to understand virus side interactions.

Lange wasn’t quite ready to move on at the end of her post-doc, and the success with her research led Burke to invite her to stay on as an assistant research professor.

“During that time, I was more exposed to leading people and mentoring people in the lab. I was able to get some teaching experience in that role as well in the infection, immunity and advanced virology classes,” Lange said. “The position evolved into really enjoying all of the components that would be required for a tenure track position and it grew from there.”

In her sixth year as an assistant researcher, Lange decided she was ready to run her own lab. However, she knew it would be a challenge to secure a faculty position and even more difficult to stay at MU.

But, her experience in the Burke lab and her proven ability to obtain grant funding worked in her favor.

“It’s really nice to stay in Missouri because mine and my husband’s family are here,” Lange said. “When I was growing up, my dad was in the military and we moved around a lot, so I never got to know my grandparents or cousins. It’s really nice now that my kids get to have those relationships with their extended family.”

Her goal with her new lab is to combine her knowledge of viral interaction in the body and hosts’ response to infection.

Three projects currently in the works for grant submission focus on host-virus interactions and how different host factors and viral proteins interact during replication. One specific project looks at the host factors that are involved in HIV induced death caused by different HIV proteins.

“While HIV has been around for a long time, there are still things we don’t know about it. With the research, I’m getting back to my innate immunity roots and looking at exactly how viruses interact with innate immune receptors and signaling pathways and how that interaction dictates pathogenic outcomes,” Lange said.

Understanding the death pathways for HIV can lead to the development of a strategy to preserve T cells and facilitate the death of the virus. Additionally, it can lead to the development of therapies toward eradication.

Her excitement isn’t just for her new lab, it’s also for her newfound opportunity to provide students with lab experience and open up the possibility of research for those who haven’t had access to it.

“I’m from a rural community and I didn’t even know that a Ph.D. existed when I was in high school,” Lange said. “I’d really like to present those opportunities to people like me who have no idea that they’re even available. There are so many things you don’t realize are possible because of the environment that you’re in whether it be in rural or inner-city communities.”

While unknowingly launching her career at the outset of her Ph.D. program, Lange is grateful her path led her here.

“It’s been really fortunate for me, the way the whole process developed. I love this building and the awesome people I’ve met here, but I’ve been here since 2008, so having a fresh perspective elsewhere could be beneficial. I’ve worked a long time with both Marc Johnson and Donald Burke and being away from the building will allow me to meet new investigators and establish new collaborations,” Lange said. “While we still have very productive collaborations and have promising, active projects, it will help demonstrate that I’m separate from them and have my own interests as well.”

A passion for teaching rooted in research

October 9, 2019 By Roger Meissen in Research Tags: Donald Burke

Amanda Paz Herrera extends her passion for research to teaching others when teaching science. | photo by Roger Meissen, Bond LSC

By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

Dry erase markers and Styrofoam molecular models are a part of Amanda Paz Herrera’s repertoire when teaching complex scientific processes to the average person.

Teaching the next generation of scientists requires work and discipline, but Paz Herrera is up for the task.

Paz Herrera takes her science on the road with Science on Wheels, a traveling group of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers at MU who aim to make science accessible to rural communities in Columbia’s surrounding counties. Sciences on Wheels visits schools, nursing homes, clubs and public events making it imperative to communicate complex scientific processes and mechanisms to all learning levels.

“We should be able to build a knowledge bridge to communicate what we as scientists do without jargon making people feel uncomfortable,” said Paz Herrera, a third-year biochemistry Ph.D. student in Donald Burke’s lab at Bond LSC. “We’re supported by taxpayer money, so the community has a right to know how that money is being used and how we’re moving forward scientifically.”

Paz Herrera emphasizes the importance of diversity and representation in the field on top of her passion for science education and outreach.

“Scientists look like you and me and there’s way more diversity than is depicted in popular thought,” Paz Herrera said. “One of the reasons I do science on wheels is to show what a scientist can look like and that brings a lot of power to little kids that may look like me. When they see someone that looks like them that can do this, that is life-changing.”

Paz Herrera’s research has been driven by her desire to see and understand things at the tiniest level. When she was in the second grade, she owned a play light microscope and would look at her hair or the fibers from her shirt.

When going through the three rotations at the start of her doctorate program, Paz Herrera visited a nuclear magnetic resonance lab and an X-ray crystallography lab, both of which would provide her expertise in studying biology at the structural level. However, her third rotation in the Burke lab changed her perception of what the rest of her program could look like.

While the Burke lab doesn’t specialize in structural biology, its focus on viruses and cancers offers an avenue for Paz Herrera to apply her interest.

A recent study Paz Herrera collaborated on with her colleagues from the Burke lab and researchers across campus optimized RNA and DNA molecules, called aptamers, to carry cancer diagnostics or therapeutics like backpacks to receptors on cell surfaces.

Now, Paz Herrera is looking to visualize the interaction of those same molecules with a protein on the cell surface of the Ebola virus for her dissertation.

However, working with the actual Ebola virus requires a biosafety level 4, and the Bond Life Sciences Center only has a biosafety level 2. So, the researchers in the Burke lab had to get creative.

To study the virus interaction in a safe manner, collaborative researcher Alex Bukreyev who works in Galveston, Texas, engineered a lab model that combines a cattle virus with the protein present on the Ebola virus cells. Because the virus only infects cattle, researchers won’t be infected but can still study what they’re most interested in – the glycoprotein on Ebola cells.

Paz Herrera wants to visualize the interaction to understand how that happens. Understanding the interaction between the proteins on the surface of cells and the aptamers can help researchers develop drugs or diagnostics further down the line.

Visualizing it isn’t as easy as looking under a microscope. By themselves, aptamers can’t be seen on the surface of a cell, making it impossible to find where they are or see how they are functioning.

Paz Herrera is working on building a ‘plug-and-play’ modular dart made up of an aptamer, an interjecting body and a gold nanoparticle tail. The gold nanoparticle tail allows her to see where the aptamer is and subsequently visualize the interaction happening.

Amanda Paz Herrera displays her gold nanoparticle models which accompany her at science outreach events. | Photo contributed by Amanda Paz Herrera

Using a basic electron microscope available in Mizzou’s Electron Microscope Core, Paz Herrera has begun to infer where the interaction is using staining. However, she is looking forward to using cryo-electron microscopy (CryoEM) that will soon be available. Using CryoEM will allow her to see the aptamer interaction embedded in ice, providing more molecular detail.

The interjecting body in her model joins the gold nanoparticle with a compatible aptamer. This technology can expand far past Ebola and will help researchers study the interaction between aptamers and proteins in other applications.

Paz Herrera didn’t have much research experience as an undergrad. Instead, she did a lot of educational outreach with elementary and high school students.

“I would do cheek cell samples with them. They would swab the inside of their cheek, put it on a slide and stain it and see their own cells,” Paz Herrera said. “They would go crazy.”

As she progressed in her biochemistry career, she learned that there was more to science than viewing cells under a microscope. She saw graduate school as an opportunity to solidify herself as a scientist and also to prepare to teach the next generation of scientists.

“I really want to do what some of the best professors did for me – to inspire a thirst for inquiry and asking questions,” Paz Herrera said. “When a professor uses an acronym in class, they expect you to understand what they’re saying, but learning isn’t like that and shouldn’t be like that. Sometimes we have great experts in the field that have the curse of knowledge and don’t have the best tools to communicate that knowledge.”

Paz Herrera is also minoring in college teaching and has been shadowing Margaret Lange’s classes, an assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology, to prepare herself as a future educator. She also has the ambitious goal of being a guest lecturer in all of the biochemistry undergraduate classes to strengthen her skills and receive feedback.

Her goal is to make learning science more relatable and enjoyable.

“As I progress in my education, although I become focused in my field, I will never forget where I started so that when I teach, I can break the complexity barrier,” Paz Herrera said. “I want to make science appealing, understandable and accessible not only to my future students but to the community and public as well.”