Researcher Jay J. Thelen

#IAmScience Ethan Myers

May 3, 2019 By Mariah Cox in #IAmScience, Research Tags: Jay Thelen

By Mariah Cox | Bond LSC

Preparing home-cooked meals regularly and maintaining houseplants can oftentimes be too time-consuming for stressed-out college students, but not for Ethan Myers.

At Myers’ student apartment you can find a bonsai tree and a plethora of herbs such as catnip, basil, mint and even some pepper plants. This love of plants comes from his childhood when he spent his summers helping his grandma plant shrubs, flowers and trees in her garden.

Using the herbs she grew in her garden, Myers would help his grandma cook Thanksgiving dinner and appetizers for her game club called ‘the game girls.’ Working alongside her in the garden and the kitchen, all while sharing a common passion for nature, formed the strong relationship they still have today.

“Me and my grandma are tight,” said the biochemistry undergrad.

His knack for gardening as well as his interest in plants from a scientific perspective led him to pursue a degree in biochemistry and pick up an independent research project in the Jay Thelen lab in Bond LSC.

“My grandpa was a nuclear physicist and so having that science background from him has been interesting and fulfilling to see why things in the wild are the way they are and how they can be altered in a science setting,” Myers said.

Working with post-doctoral fellow Eric Fedosejevs, Myers pursues two hypotheses to increase the amount of oil production in soybeans.

The first looks to overexpress a subunit of Acetyl-CoA Carboxylase, a biotin-dependent enzyme that provides the malonyl-CoA substrate for the biosynthesis of fatty acids. By overexpressing this subunit, Myers anticipates finding an increased amount of oil production in the test plants.

Another hypothesis looks to under-express a family of proteins that are negative regulators of acetyl-Coa carboxylase. By under-expressing biotin associated domain-containing proteins (BADCs) and inhibiting the gene that encodes BADCs, the protein can’t bind, and the plant will be able to produce more fatty acids.

Ethan Myers prepares crude protein samples for isolation and purification for his research with soybeans. | photo by Mariah Cox, Bond LSC [/caption]

Soybean oil is an environmentally friendly, renewable alternative to petroleum diesel. According to the United Soybean Board, biodiesel reduces greenhouse gas emissions by up to 86 percent.

By fortifying soybeans to produce more oil, less landmass, labor and other environmental resources, such as water and minerals, are needed.

“It’s important to be able to use resources to their fullest potential,” Myers said. “Soybeans are used for protein in the form of tofu and edamame as well as biofuels and industrial lubricants. Because of the increase in the world’s population, there has been a throttle on resources. By modifying plants to be more efficient, we can mitigate some of the stress on the planet.”

In other words, if we can get more out of one plant while using fewer resources, it creates a more sustainable supply while lessening the impacts on the environment.

In his spare time, Myers enjoys cooking as another passion. His interest in food really grew when he began working in restaurants almost 10 years ago.

“I really enjoy cooking for myself and my friends,” Myers said. “I use the herbs that I grow in my backyard. I made a homemade chicken alfredo pizza this past Sunday for a Game of Thrones watch party.”

The next step in Myers’ life likely leads to a doctoral program elsewhere. He is currently applying to Ph.D. programs at the University of California, Davis, University of Texas, Austin, University of Colorado, Denver and Michigan State University. In the future, he hopes to be a biochemistry professor and instill in his students the same sense of wonder that he has in his research.

“In this day and age, there are so many things that you can just Google and have an answer in seconds,” Myers said. “But there are so many questions out there where there is no answer on Google and you have to make your own understanding of things. It’s become so easy to have an answer at your fingertips, but it’s so much more valuable to actually figure something out on your own.”

#IAmScience Stephanie Scott

June 7, 2018 By Allison Scott in #IAmScience Tags: biochemistry

By Allison Scott | Bond Life Sciences Center

Students choose colleges for a number of reasons: location, price, programs offered. Stephanie Scott was just a kid the first time she stepped onto Mizzou’s campus, and she knew it was the school for her.

“We took a field trip, and I fell in love with the place because it had three swimming pools,” Scott said.

While that’s not a typical selling point for places of higher education, it proved enough to plant the seed for Scott, who works in the Thelen Lab at Bond LSC and just finished up her freshman year.

Scott’s didn’t end up in Bond LSC accidentally, either. She’s a Discovery Fellow through the Honors College, which gives her a scholarship to work as a research assistant.

“The program paired me with Dr. Thelen and Eric Fedosejevs as my mentor,” Scott said.

The campus-wide program allows students of all majors to get involved in research for two years, and it has opened the door for Scott to get started in hands-on science early.

In the lab, Scott works to isolate plastids — which contribute to the food-making abilities and color of plants — in soybeans.

“First, we pick the leaves or beans and keep them on ice. Then, we go back down to the lab and run them through a juicer to break them up,” Scott said. “We run them in an isolation buffer and, after that, we spin them down in the centrifuge to get the plastids to pellet out of the solution. Then we re-suspend the pellet and layer that over a sucrose gradient.”

That process understandably takes all day, but it’s something Scott has found a passion for. And it has the possibility to make a big impact — the ultimate goal is to get more oil out of soybeans to increase the food supply.

“I think it’s fun,” Scott said. “It’s a challenge because the plastids behave differently every time. They’re really finicky.”

And her introduction to research so early in her college career has made Scott evaluate the ways in which her future could incorporate the lab.

“When I first came here, I was dead set on being pre-med,” Scott said. “I was planning on using research as a stepping stone, but since I’ve started actually working in the lab I figured out I love it. I feel like I might actually make a difference.”

Really, that’s all she could ask for.

“If I didn’t like research so much, I wouldn’t care as much as I do,” Scott said. “I love the people I work with, too, and that makes it seem like it’s not even a job.”

#IAmScience Eric Fedosejevs

February 16, 2018 By Allison Scott in #IAmScience Tags: soybeans

By Allison Scott | Bond LSC

“#IAmScience because I want to discover how plants decide what to store in their seeds.”

The family garden doesn’t typically turn into a life-long journey of studying plants. But when Eric Fedosejevs went to college, the native Canadian found that plants naturally made sense when deciding what to do with his life.

“Growing up, we always had a big garden with a lot of vegetables,” Fedosejevs said. “And with the ever-present need to increase food supply and address world hunger, combined with the innovation in plant-based technologies, there seemed like a lot of potential in plant biology.”

As a postdoc in Jay Thelen’s lab in Bond LSC, Fedosejevs has gone from longtime student to full-time researcher.

“A major focus of the Thelen lab is to look at oil biosynthesis in developing seeds,” Fedosejevs said.

Specifically, Fedosejevs works with soybean, which is a key crop in the United States because it has such a high protein content. But oil production suffers because of the high protein and his focus is looking at altering that part of the seed.

“The oil content of soybean is not as high as most oil seeds,” Fedosejevs said. “The goal of my project is to boost that content without causing any significant decrease to the valuable protein.”

In his role as a postdoc, Fedosejevs has the freedom to do what he loves with the guidance of an established researcher in Thelen.

“This experience has been great,” Fedosejevs said. “Jay gives a lot of research freedom to his postdocs, so I’ve been able to bring many of my own ideas into my project. I appreciate that a lot.”

When he’s not in the lab working on soybeans, Fedosejevs can be found reading about anything that piques his interest.

“I can spend a whole day reading about a topic I know nothing about,” Fedosejevs said.

It is that dedication to learning that landed him in academia, and it’s also what guided him to a career as a researcher. Fedosejevs, however, believes that genuine curiosity is the foundation for being successful in science.

“If you have that mindset and you find a research area you’re also passionate about, a postdoc is very much something to look forward to,” Fedosejevs said.

He’s able to focus all of his energy on his work, and he loves it.

“I’m really happy coming to work and doing research every day.” Fedosejevs said. “I’m going to keep doing that for as long as I can.”

Modifying molecules with lasers

October 23, 2017 By Roger Meissen in Research Tags: Jay Thelen

Brief by Roger Meissen| Bond LSC

What do lasers have to do with food allergies?

Bond LSC’s Jay Thelen was recently part of a team that looked at how short laser pulses might be used to modify peptides and proteins to make foods edible for those with specific allergies.

Thelen, a biochemistry professor, joined scientists from his department, engineering and Denmark to explore this possibility. What they found was a way to modify molecules quicker and more cheaply than current chemical methods. This could potentially lower costs for specific applications in medicine, pharmacology, biotechnology and more.

We don’t want to give everything away, so read the whole story from MU’s College of Engineering.

Striking Oil

August 16, 2017 By Mary Jane Rogers in Research Tags: BADC proteins, Claudete Santa Cantarina, metabolic engineering, oil seeds, proteomics technology, seed biology, Vanildo Silveria, Yajin Ye

By MJ Rogers, Bond LSC

You can’t get blood out of a stone, but Jay Thelen wants to find ways to get more oil from seeds.

“We’re specifically working on the metabolic engineering of oil seeds. Broadly, trying to increase the oil content of crops and raise the value of the seed in the process,” said Thelen, a Bond Life Sciences Center researcher.

Seed biology and metabolic engineering have long been interests for Thelen, and his lab combines biochemistry with cutting-edge proteomics technology to identify new regulatory modules for key metabolic enzymes.

But let’s start with why seed oil is important.

Seed oil is big business, enough so that scientists are trying to maximize the amount of oil that seeds produce. It represents an important, renewable source of food and feedstocks, used for everything from salad dressing to combustible fuel. More than 448 million tons of oilseed crops were consumed in 2015-2016, according to USDA Economic Research Service.

The oil essentially comes from lipids, or fats, in plant seeds or fruits. All plant cells contain lipids, and embryonic cells within young seeds are poised to make an abundance of them, especially the storage lipid triacylglycerol.

While tree nuts can be up to 80 percent oil, most oilseed crops store 15 to 45 percent oil within their seed. Through biotechnology and metabolic engineering scientists want to increased this amount, something Thelen aims to do.

His end goal is to increase the oil in crops such as soybeans and canola, but any biotechnological idea for increasing seed oil starts in the model plant Arabidopsis.

Modified plants that are being grown in Thelen’s lab in Bond LSC. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC

“Arabidopsis is easy to transform in the lab and has a short life cycle,” he said. “We can use this plant to quickly demonstrate proof-of-principle for enhancing seed oil and then advance successful strategies to soybean, camelina, or canola.”

To increase seed oil content, Thelen’s lab works on a large protein complex called Acetyl-CoA carboxylase or ACCase – an enzyme that catalyzes the first step towards oil production.

“We made a recent breakthrough on the regulation of this complex,” Thelen said.

The proteins critical to this process are called BADC proteins – they are kin to an essential part of ACCase, but are inactive. BADC proteins significantly inhibit the activity of ACCase by mimicking its functional sibling and slowing the complex down.

Basically, BADC is a way for the plant to control and slow down the production of fatty acids. By “turning off” the BADC protein, ACCase is de-regulated and oil content in seeds significantly increases.

“We leveraged this discovery to make higher oil producing plants by simply shutting down expression of this gene family by RNA interference,” said Thelen. “Consequently this increased seed oil content quite a bit. We’re now in the process of studying gene knockouts for this family in soybean and camelina.”

Yajin Ye, a postdoctoral researcher from China in Thelen’s lab, is in the thick of this work. He spends his time modifying seeds to maximize seed oil content and tracking the seed oil measurements in the GC-MS instrument.

The GC-MS machine, which tracks the seed oil measurements. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC

“If you want to know how much oil is in each seed, you use this instrument,” Ye said, pointing to the GC-MS. “It measures the oil content of the samples we provide it.”

Arabidopsis seed are much smaller than most people expect, so tiny and light that researchers have to be cautious that they don’t become airborne and cause cross-contamination. In addition, soybean plants are kept upstairs in a fifth floor greenhouse at Bond LSC. While camelina are grown in growth chambers within Schweitzer Hall as part of a collaboration with Dr. Abraham Koo, an assistant professor in the Biochemistry Department.

Thelen's soybean plants — Thelen’s soybean plants, which are kept in the fifth floor greenhouse of Bond LSC. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC

“Each of the [soybean] plants are transgenic and were screened for higher oil content as a result of BADC gene silencing. The plants are harvested every three or four months so the seed oil content can be monitored,” said Ye.

Thelen has begun patenting the BADC technology and another strategy for engineering ACCase to “make it a more efficient enzyme complex.” The BADC technology was co-invented with his previous graduate student, Matthew Salie, who now works as a postdoctoral research associate at the Scripps Research Institute in San Diego. The patent examination process can take years, but if the technology is approved it would mean a huge influx of money in the agricultural market.

“The math is quite simple,” Thelen said. “A one percent increase in soybean seed oil translates to hundreds of millions of dollars. The numbers fluctuate depending on the market, but a one percent increase translates to about 200 million dollars for soybean alone. A five percent increase, which again, I think is achievable, when realized across the diversity of oilseed crops, we’re talking billions in added crop value annually.”

Yajin Ye, with Vanildo Silveria and Caludete Santa Cantarina — Yajin Ye, a postdoctoral researcher from China, with Vanildo Silveria and Caludete Santa Cantarina, two visiting faculty from the State University of Rio De Janerio in Brazil. | photo by Mary Jane Rogers, Bond LSC

His innovative approach has gotten the attention of scientists and researchers all around the world. Vanildo Silveria and Claudete Santa Cantarina, two visiting faculty from the State University of Rio De Janerio in Brazil, came to Bond LSC specifically because of Thelen.

“Jay is an expert in the field and we wanted to work with him,” said Silveria.

At the moment, it seems like his research is on the right track. The initial data from Arabidopsis shows that silencing the entire BADC gene family substantially raises seed oil content, which is the main objective of his study.

“Preliminary, first-generation transgenics show soybean with higher oil. But these are greenhouse grown. Randomized field trials are still be awhile out,” Thelen said. “We’re getting closer, but still a few years away from that goal.

Thelen’s most recent oilseed research published in the journal Plant Cell in 2016, titled “A Family of Negative Regulators Targets the Committed Step of De novo Fatty Acid Biosynthesis.”

Jay J. Thelen is a professor of biochemistry at MU and a researcher at Bond Life Sciences Center. He received degrees in both biological sciences and biochemistry – a B.S. from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln and a Ph.D from the University of Missouri, Columbia. He was a postdoctoral fellow at Michigan State University and has been at MU since 2002.