A partnership between MU and Gyeongsang National University in South Korea has created lasting connections
By Eleanor Hasenbeck | Bond Life Sciences Center
Discussion went global this week as researchers converged from Gyeongsang National University in South Korea, MU and Washington University at Bond Life Sciences Center for the sixth MU-GNU International Joint Symposium in Plant Biotechnology.
Plant biologists from each university shared their research, ranging from molecular biology and signaling to breeding soybeans for improved yields. The symposium is held every two years, alternating locations between the U.S. and South Korea. This conference marks the eleventh year of collaboration between GNU and MU.
“Every trip that comes over, new collaborations develop,” said Gary Stacey, a Bond LSC scientist of soybean biotechnology and chair of the symposium’s local organizing committee. “Just at dinner the other night, you could hear people talking and saying ‘We should do that together.’ You get people together and they collide, and good things come from that. The whole idea of these symposiums is try to increase those collisions.”
As those involved share new research and ideas, these collaborations create opportunities. A former student in Stacey’s lab recently received a doctoral degree from both universities as part of a joint-doctoral degree program. Undergraduate Korean students can also complete a “2+2” degree, where students can begin their studies with two years at GNU and finish with two years at MU.
The schools also exchange faculty members. GNU researchers Jong Chan Hong and Woo Sik Chung completed sabbaticals at MU. Stacey has spent time in Korea, and his lab receives funding from Korean grants.
“Getting our students to interact with Korean students and Korean faculty expands their horizons, gets them in contact with other cultures and is really part of creating an intellectual environment where students can grow,” Stacey said.
For Stacey, the symposium has also brought valued friendships. “After you’ve been over there, and you know these guys for eleven years, it’s like your cousin coming home,” he said. “You’re not a visitor anymore. You’re like part of the family.”
For more information about the science exchanged, visit http://staceylab.missouri.edu/symposium.
Researchers in the Mendoza-Cozatl lab grow beans in a soil that simulates Martian soil
By Eleanor C. Hasenbeck | Bond Life Sciences
As NASA works to send people to Mars, researchers at the Mendoza-Cozatl lab at Bond Life Sciences Center are exploring the possibility of sending beans to the red planet. The journey from Earth to Mars alone would take somewhere between 100 to 300 days. To feed astronauts on these longer missions, scientists are studying space horticulture.
Norma Castro, a research associate in the lab, studies how common beans grow in a soil that simulates Mars’ red soil. The common bean is a good candidate for interstellar cultivation. Beans are a very nutritious crop, and their affinity for nitrogen-fixing bacteria can improve soil health while requiring less fertilizer. Castro is trying to understand how different varieties of beans could grow in the soil.
“This kind of research not only will tell us the right plants to take to Mars, but also which kind of technology needs to be developed,” Castro said.
Erica Majumder, a biochemistry Ph.D candidate. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC
By Mary Jane Rogers | Bond LSC
“#IAmScience because I am endlessly curious and the world needs scientific solutions to our grand challenges.”
That is the attitude of someone who does her research with a purpose. Since the age of 14, Erica knew she wanted to pursue a degree in chemistry. Today, she uses that passion to research how anaerobic bacteria interact with uranium; essentially asking the question, “How do microbes and metals interact?”
What’s her end game? Improved health of the environment.
Neuroscientist and former Secretary of State science adviser to speak at Life Sciences Week
Frances Colón has spent the past decade representing the United States all over the world on topics ranging from climate change to the advancement of women scientists. She will reflect on that experience in her talk at 3:30 p.m. Monday, April 11 in Monsanto Auditorium. | Photo courtesy of Frances Colón
By Eleanor C. Hasenbeck | Bond Life Sciences
A career in science doesn’t only mean working in a lab, and no one knows that better than Frances Colón.
Colón, a neuroscientist by training and policy maker by trade, will speak about how scientists can become more involved in policy without abandoning the laboratory bench.
During her Missouri Life Sciences Week lecture “My path to science citizenship,” Colón will talk about her transition from the lab to policy. She’ll speak 3:30 p.m. Monday, April 10, in Monsanto Auditorium.
“I think scientists need to realize that they have a broader set of skills than they give themselves credit for that can be applied to the service of the community and their country in many different ways,” said Colón. “I think we’re living in a time where our country needs scientists to get engaged at every level. That doesn’t mean they need to leave a career in academia to go into policy, but it could certainly mean involvement everywhere from the community level to the national level.”
After receiving a doctoral degree in neuroscience and studying how nerve cells mature at Brandeis University, Colón first got involved in making policy as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences policy fellow. She then served as science and environment adviser for western hemisphere affairs for more than three years before she became deputy science and technology adviser to the Secretary of State, a position she served in until January.
As deputy science adviser, she led efforts to reengage Cuba in scientific collaboration after U.S. policy regarding Cuba shifted. She also coordinated climate change policy for the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas, and she worked to advance women and girls in science, technology, engineering and math. Today, she looks to use platforms outside of the government to accomplish the same missions.
Colón said of her career thus far, she is most proud of the work she’s done to educate women in opportunities in STEM careers.
“A lot of these countries started to realize that they can’t tackle a lot of the biggest challenges they’re confronting, from climate change to energy security, without having all of their best talent at the table. That required providing equal opportunity for women and men to achieve these positions,” Colón said. “We worked a lot on finding opportunities for girls to discover STEM careers and to help countries plan out what their STEM capacity building activities could be.”
These activities included things like the two-week camps for girls in South America and Africa, where they learned about coding and genetics with help from corporate partners.
Colón holds a doctorate from Brandeis University, and a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Puerto Rico. She was a delegate to the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations’ Young Leaders Forum, and a graduate of the National Hispana Leadership Institute. Last year, she was named one of the 20 most influential Latinos in technology by CNET en Español.
Colón will speak at 3:30 Monday, April 10 in Monsanto Auditorium as part of Missouri Life Sciences Week.
Sheryl Koenig, the Grant Proposal Manager at Bond LSC. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC
By Mary Jane Rogers | Bond LSC
“#IAmScience because I need to connect the dots. How do all the puzzle pieces fit together? Why do things do what they do? How can I apply that to other things?”
For Sheryl Koenig, science communication is an enormous part of her daily tasks. She works with researchers and scientists during the grant proposal process to translate technical scientific concepts into persuasive and relevant content. Why? So that those scientists can access the means to expand their #MizzouResearch and make exciting breakthroughs. Sheryl literally helps turn their ideas and dreams into reality! #scicomm
“Living things are too beautiful for there not to be a mathematics that describes them.”
Thomas D. Schneider will speak Tuesday, April 11 in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium. | Photo by National Institutes of Health
This is Thomas Schneider’s motto.
Schneider, a research biologist at the National Cancer Institute, spent most of his career understanding math and its relation with fundamental biology. His lab focuses on the DNA and RNA patterns that characterize genetic control systems; they invented the widely-used sequence logos.
“In the first place, I am doing this because I am curious,” Schneider said. “Let’s go find the math and who knows what would come out of that.”
Schneider will speak during the 33rd annual Missouri Life Sciences Week, a celebration of MU’s science research and collaboration across disciplines.
Claude Shannon’s information theory lays the foundation of Schneider’s study. In the landmark paper published in 1948, Shannon defined the quantity of information and how it transmits amid interference of noise. When people communicate via a phone call, the heat of the telephone line is one type of noise. As noise contaminates information, the highest rate at which information can be reliably transmitted over a noisy communication channel is defined as the channel capacity.
A similar concept emerges in Schneider’s Molecular Information Theory. It leads to a theoretical measure of the efficiency of molecules.
“I thought [Shannon’s] theory was screaming as I dragged it into biology. The stunning thing is that it fits biology really, really well,” Schneider said.
He looked at the DNA binding protein EcoRI, a restriction enzyme that binds DNA. When it binds, there is an inequality relationship between information and the information gained for the dissipated energy. The efficiency of DNA binding sites on nucleic acids is about 70 percent.
This mysterious number has appeared widely in his research and it also describes ecological evenness. In an even ecosystem with all species being equally represented, the evenness is close to 100 percent, but when only one species dominates the environment, its evenness dwindles to 0 percent.
Schneider found that fish species diversity in a Georgia estuary is near 70 percent and the evenness of plant species in different divisions of 8-square-meter plots in California is also around 70 percent.
When Schneider turns from ecological system to biological systems, this number still stands out. Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), a free-living tiny worm, has been extensively studied and has had its entire cell lineage traced. On the basis of previous studies, Schneider calculated the efficiency of its lineage and found that the number fits the ubiquitous 70 percent, when excluding the dead cells of a C. elegans.
With this established case, one of his colleagues suggested looking into one of human’s biggest enemy – cancer. Cancer occurs when a cell develops mutations and grows out of control. Schneider hypothesized that if you have more of a certain type of cell, then you have a larger chance for that cell type to get a mutation that might lead to cancer.
The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) publishes a report on all different types of cancers observed each five or six years. Based on the data collected by IARC and the hypothesis, Schneider found that for adults whose ages are above 14 years old, the cancer type evenness always remains around 70 percent.
“The thing that is interesting is that when you understand things fundamentally, it inevitably leads to practical results,” Schneider said.
Schneider’s speech on “Three Principles of Biological States: Ecology and Cancer” will be held at 1:15 p.m. April 11 in the Monsanto Auditorium at Bond Life Sciences Center.
Missouri Life Sciences Week is a university-wide event that brings together research across scientific disciplines at Mizzou. This year will highlight more than 300 student, faculty and staff research presentations and four topical lectures by accomplished researchers in addition to career development workshops and scientific service and supply exhibits.
Andrew Hanson, right, will speak Friday, April 14 in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium as the 2017 Dr. Charles W Gehrke speaker. | Photo by University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences
People often think of metabolism as a perfect network. But that assumption is simply not accurate.
Andrew Hanson, an eminent scholar and professor at the University of Florida, describes the misunderstanding as “the power of a paradigm.” American biochemist Albert Lehninger spread the misunderstanding in his classic textbook “Biochemistry”, in which the message he communicated to generations of students was: metabolism is a beautiful machine that functions flawlessly.
Hanson challenges this “metabolism is perfect” paradigm using illustrations from different kinds of organisms in his lecture. He will speak in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium at 1 p.m. Friday April 14, during the 33rd annual Missouri Life Sciences Week.
For every living organism, metabolism is the sum of every chemical reaction that occurs to maintain life. This sum contains all the metabolites — small molecules created at each level of cell processes and final products — that share a part in the growth, development, reproduction and running of cells and whole organisms.
However, enzymes can make mistakes; many chemical compounds in cells are unstable and undergo spontaneous reactions. The consequences of enzyme errors and chemical side-reactions are, at best, unwanted and sometimes toxic, so organisms have developed mechanisms – damage-control systems – to deal with the consequences of damage.
Hanson’s lab has studied metabolite damage and the damage-control systems that plants and microorganisms employ to cope. But the impact of metabolic problems also reaches into the human domain, causing disease from failure or mutation of damage repair enzymes. “It matters in aging humans and animals a great deal, because aging is the result of cumulative damage,” Hanson said.
Plants are also afflicted by metabolite damage. Under environmental stress such as high temperature or water loss, the error rate of enzymes and rates of unwanted chemical reactions can go up.
The understanding of metabolite damage could also advance metabolic engineering, which is a purposeful manipulation by combining metabolic pathways and DNA techniques to produce desired products. After creating new pathways in an organism, it may fail to cope with the abnormal reactions produced by the new pathways. To fix the problem, the only solution might be to install the required damage control enzymes.
Hanson’s lab hopes to identify new or unsuspected damage reactions, and enzymes that repair or prevent damage. They also are working to connect with metabolic engineering groups that install modified pathways in plants and microbes to study sources of damage and propose solutions.
Metabolism is not perfect. However, after studying its imperfection for years, Hanson concluded, “life is put together in a very beautiful and even more powerful way than we first realize. It makes a lot of mistakes, but it also fixes them so well that we do not even notice them.”
Hanson’s lecture on “Fixing or safely trashing broken metabolites and why it matters” is this year’s Charles W. Gehrke distinguished lecture. Gehrke, a longtime MU professor of Biochemistry, was selected by NASA to analyze rocks retrieved from the first moon landing for any traces of extraterrestrial life. He died in 2009.
Hanson’s lecture is free and open to the public as part of Missouri Life Sciences Week. It occurs at 1:00 on Friday, April 14 in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium. See more about events during the week at bondlsc.missouri.edu/life-sciences-week.
Mahmoud Khalafalla, a Ph.D. student at Weisman’s lab, is isolating RNA from salivary glands of Sjögren’s syndrome mouse model to look for the expression of pro-inflammatory genes. | photo by Jinghong Chen, Bond LSC
By Jinghong Chen | Bond Life Sciences Center
Our immune system is often the key to our health. Everyday, it works to protect us from foreign invaders such as bacteria and virus, but what happens when it attacks our own tissues?
Gary Weisman, a Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at the Bond Life Sciences Center, is working to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind immune system function and autoimmune diseases such as Sjögren’s syndrome.
In our immune system, B cells are responsible for producing antibodies to recognize foreign invaders. However, in many autoimmune diseases, B cells produce autoantibodies that recognize our own proteins, causing inflammation and tissue damage. In Sjögren’s syndrome (SS), they attack the glands that produce saliva and tears.
Patients with SS often suffer chronic dry eyes and dry mouth, which might lead to bacterial infection, difficulties in swallowing and speech.
“The symptoms decrease the quality of life rather than the length of life,” said Lucas Woods, research lab manager in Weisman’s lab.
Although SS patients are at higher risk of developing lymphoma cancers and other concurrent autoimmune diseases that may increase mortality, Woods further explained.
According to the Sjögren’s Syndrome Foundation, there are an estimated four million people living with the disease in the U.S. For unknown reasons, 90 percent of them are female.
Yet, current clinical treatments only reduce symptoms by using artificial saliva and tears or cholinergic agents to promote fluid secretion, but there is no approved treatment to reduce the inflammation of the glands themselves. This is the focus of Weisman’s lab.
Sensor of danger
There are 15 different types of nucleotide receptors in humans that regulate numerous cell processes from inflammatory responses to tissue regeneration. Those receptors are stimulated by nucleotides such as ATP. In the past three and a half years, Mahmoud Khalafalla, a Ph.D. student in Weisman’s lab, has focused on one of them in particular – the P2X7 receptor.
Previous studies show increased P2X7 expression in salivary glands from SS patients, as compared to healthy individuals. To understand the reasons behind this, Weisman’s lab used genetically modified mice that develop disease traits similar to SS patients.
In this mouse model, Sjögren’s-like disease occurs when the immune cells invade salivary glands and damage the tissue, leading to decreased saliva production. The invasion of immune cells is triggered by proinflammatory cytokines, a type of signaling molecule that promotes the recruitment of immune cells to the inflamed areas.
But what induces those cytokines?
Weisman’s lab tries to piece together the answer. For the first time, they found that the P2X7 receptor is responsible for the release of these proinflammatory molecules from salivary gland epithelial cells.
To function, most cell-surface receptors require ligands that bind to the receptor to induce cellular responses. The ligand for the P2X7 receptor is ATP – the “energy currency inside of cells.” P2X7 receptors are activated when high concentrations of ATP are released to the outside of the cells, which typically occurs when the cells are injured during inflammation.
“P2X7 receptors [act like] the sensor of danger,” Khalafalla said.
After identifying the role of the P2X7 receptor, the lab then asked: if we stop its activation, what would happen?
Using a drug that inhibits P2X7 receptor activation, they blocked the receptor in their SS mouse model to determine its effect on the development of autoimmune disease. Interestingly, saliva secretion was restored when the P2X7 receptor is blocked while the levels of invading immune cells in salivary glands were dramatically reduced.
“This gives us the thought that [blockade of the] P2X7 receptor is really a promising strategy to reduce salivary inflammation. This may not only relate to Sjögren’s syndrome, but to other autoimmune diseases as well,” Khalafalla said.
Our receptor
Another similar receptor that plays a role in autoimmune diseases is the P2Y2 receptor, which has been referred to as “our receptor” by Weisman’s lab.
As one of the researchers who proved the existence of this receptor, Weisman has spent most of his career studying it.
One of his research projects investigating P2Y2 receptors in human disease recently gained a grant extension for another five years from the National Institutes of Health. The lab found that in a mouse model of SS, similar to the P2X7 receptor, the expression of P2Y2 receptors was increased in both the salivary gland epithelial cells and immune cells.
Furthermore, after they knocked out the P2Y2 receptor in the SS mouse model by breeding them with genetically-modified P2Y2 receptor knockout mice, the inflammation of salivary glands was dramatically reduced.
“The very next step is that we are going to isolate these immune cells out of the diseased mouse salivary glands, and characterize what kinds of cells they are. We want to know exactly which ones are controlling the development of autoimmune diseases, and how P2Y2 receptors and nucleotides like ATP in general are contributing to the diseases,” Woods said.
Gary Weisman is a Curator’s Distinguished Professor of Biochemistry at the Bond Life Sciences Center. His research focuses on the relationship between inflammatory diseases and nucleotide receptors. He currently works on a collaborative research project with Dr. Carisa Petris, an eye surgeon at the MU Hospital, to understand the mechanism of how Sjögren’s syndrome damages the tear-secreting lacrimal glands in mice.
Marc Johnson, a virology professor at Bond LSC. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC
By Mary Jane Rogers | Bond LSC
“#IAmScience because the mysteries of the natural world aren’t going to solve themselves.”
Since the third grade, Marc Johnson never wanted to be anything else but a mad scientist. What began as experimenting with sprouting seeds and chemistry sets has blossomed into a career in virology. Specifically, he studies the “moves and countermoves” of viral components, a few hundred thousand at time! His advice for people wondering if science is for them: “If you’ve ever stayed up until 4 in the morning to finish a puzzle, you might be a scientist.”
Jessica Whited studies the genetics behind how salamanders grow severed limbs
By Eleanor Hasenbeck | Bond LSC
An axolotl rests at the bottom of its tank at Menagerie du Jardin des Plantes in Paris. | photo by Jack Baker, Flickr
It takes about two months for an axolotl to regenerate a lost limb. Humans, as you probably know, don’t regenerate limbs.
But, a basic understanding of how the Mexican salamander regrows limbs advance regenerative medicine in humans according to Jessica Whited, a researcher at Brigham Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Whited will speak at 3:30 p.m., Thursday April 13, in Monsanto Auditorium as part of Missouri Life Sciences Week at Bond Life Science Center. Her lecture, “Identifying roadblocks to regeneration in axolotl salamanders” will present the lab’s discoveries and evidence that a specific gene in axolotls can block the animal’s ability to regenerate.
Whited’s lab found axolotls can exhaust their ability to regenerate. When a limb is severed repeatedly, the salamander stops producing blastemas, the mass of cells capable of regeneration that allow the limb to grow back. This could be due to a dysregulated gene blocking the animal’s ability to produce them.
The Whited Lab sequenced the mRNA in axolotls that could regenerate limbs and that could no longer regenerate. They found 912 genes that differed between the two groups. Whited will discuss one of these genes, which her lab considers a potential inhibitor to regeneration.
“It’s much more common for people to think “Oh, what are the things that promote limb regeneration?’ than it is to think about the things that we might have to block to make it happen,” Whited said. “This project has the potential to uncover the roadblocks, which could turn out to be equally critical.”
An MU alumna, Whited received the National Institutes of Health New Innovator Award in 2015 for her work with this unique regenerative salamander. She earned a PhD in biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and two undergraduate degrees in biological sciences and philosophy at MU.
Whited attended MU as a Bright Flight and Curator’s Scholar. And though it happened nearly 20 years ago, she said receiving those two scholarships were among the most important things that happened in her career. As a high school student, she knew she would go to college, but financially, she didn’t know how it would happen. She also credits her education and undergraduate research experience at MU for preparing her to think at the research bench.
“You have to get an undergraduate education, and it totally prepared me even for graduate school at MIT, which is one of the top programs in the world, in many subjects, but in biology especially,” Whited said. “The idea that you could find a career where you’re using your brain as your primary asset, I figured that out while I was at the University of Missouri, because there were people, our professors, doing that.”
Whited’s lecture is free and open to the public as part of Missouri Life Sciences Week. It occurs at 3:30 on Thursday, April 13 in Bond LSC’s Monsanto Auditorium. See more about events during the week at bondlsc.missouri.edu/life-sciences-week.
