A team of biologists and engineers led by WUSTL faculty is seeking to find the Fountain of Youth — not in Florida, but in photosynthetic cyanobacteria (ancient little blue-green algae).
Looking at the cellular systems in cyanobacteria, and then in a model plant and a moss species, these researchers want to determine how these organisms protect themselves from radicals — chemical culprits in the aging process in everything from bacteria to human beings.
Himadri B. Pakrasi, Ph.D., professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, is the principal investigator of a five-year, $5 million project from the Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (FIBR) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In this project, the team of interdisciplinary researchers plans to use a systems-biology approach to delineate the genes and proteins in photosynthetic organisms, such as cyanobacteria and plants, and model the system that these organisms use to cope with radicals. These are products of oxidation and reduction (redox) processes, and are key culprits of causing cellular aging.
Cyanobacteria are organisms that gave rise to chloroplasts, the oxygen factory in plant cells. A half-billion years ago, cyanobacteria predated more complex organisms like multicellular plants and functioned in a world where the oxygen level of the biosphere was much less than it is today.
Over its very long life span, cyanobacteria have developed a system to survive a gradually increasing oxidizing environment, which is why Pakrasi and his group want to study the organisms so closely.
“The basic goal of the project is to model the networks that cyano-bacteria, a model vascular plant called Arabidopsis and the nonvascular moss Physcomitrella use to handle this chemical environment,” Pakrasi said. “We’re approaching this in a systematic way, using global genome-based information on all three organisms.
“We’ve recruited colleagues outside our area to assist in tackling the project. This kind of interdisciplinary approach is exemplary of the ‘new biology.'”
Both cyanobacteria and Arabidopsis have been fully sequenced, and there are imminent plans for the sequencing of Physcomitrella (see Sept. 3, 2004, Record).
Started in 2002, FIBR stresses the integrative approach to studying biology, linking the disciplines of systems and computer science — bioinformatics — with genetics and molecular biology — genomics. The FIBR program is removing the limits biologists have found increasingly frustrating in recent years when seeking funding and finding they can’t continue research because they’ve hit a technological barrier they can’t cross.
Pakrasi and his collaborators first obtained a $50,000 NSF planning grant in 2003 to explore the topic and provide a seminar to delineate the problem and develop a plan.
In 2004, they drew up a proposal to NSF, one of 100 proposals the FIBR program considered. Washington University is one of six institutions to receive FIBR funding this year.
Team members of “A Systems Approach to Study Redox Regulation of Functions of Photosynthetic Organisms,” include Rajeev Aurora, Ph.D., of Saint Louis University; Kenneth D. Belanger, Ph.D., professor of biology at Colgate University; Bijoy K. Ghosh, Ph.D., WUSTL professor of electrical and systems engineering; and Ralph S. Quatrano, Ph.D., the Spencer T. Olin Professor at WUSTL and chair of the biology department.
Senior investigators are Richard D. Smith, Ph.D., of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratories; Yukako Hihara, Ph.D., of Saitama University in Japan; and Victoria L. May, director of the WUSTL Science Outreach Program.
A major component of the grant is education. It will extend to St. Louis-area high schools via the Science Outreach Program, which keeps K-12 teachers and students up-to-date in science and engineering trends. Undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers will get hands-on experience with the “new biology,” which today comprises a good dose of mathematical, statistical and computational skills.
“Associated with this approach is a huge deluge of data,” Pakrasi said. “Few biologists today are prepared to handle that, yet we can’t escape it.
“We give our students lots of biology and chemistry, but in most instances our biology students are not taking that much math or statistics. In the future our students will have to learn these areas. The FIBR grant provides excellent opportunities to embark into this new frontier.
“They don’t know biology, and we don’t know the computational tools they use, so now we’ll bring them together,” Pakrasi added, regarding collaborating with engineers.
“We’ve learned from before our planning-grant experience that there are many talented people in engineering who want to know biology, and vice versa with biologists. It’s a big challenge, but the novelty is a lot of fun.”
Pakrasi said the first move will be to model the system in cyanobacteria and then extend it to plants to see how much of the system has been conserved.
“Whatever knowledge we gain from plants may well transcend plant biology to human biology,” Pakrasi said. “Plants make all sorts of vitamins, the antioxidant ones, A and E, to protect themselves against oxidants.
“We will extend what we find to all aspects of cell function. The proteins and enzymes in these protective pathways already are drawing interest from drug companies as targets for new therapies.”