Default | NEWS

5/4/2007

BY LYNETTE MCGLAMERY
Special to the Rice News

Vision point: We must aggressively foster collaborative relationships with other institutions to leverage our resources.

Last year during his rotation in Terri Koehler’s anthrax research lab at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Troy Hammerstrom became interested in studying a protein in an anthrax bacterium that could be key in creating medicines to prevent or treat the disease.

The second-year graduate student in the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Houston found that while Koehler’s expertise in microbiology could help him understand the overall function of the protein, he needed special equipment to break down the protein’s structure to analyze the specific functions of each component.

JEFF FITLOW

ED NIKONOWICZ AND TROY HAMMERSTROM

And thanks to a new NIH-funded graduate training program in biodefense through the Gulf Coast Consortia’s (GCC) Keck Center for Interdisciplinary Bioscience Training, Hammerstrom has easy access to the additional resources he needs from Ed Nikonowicz, associate professor of biochemistry and cell biology at Rice University and a renowned structural biology expert.

Hammerstrom is one of three graduate students participating in the two-year training program, in which each graduate student selects a primary and a secondary co-mentor from the six different GCC institutions — one in structural, computational or chemical biology and one in a biomedical field related to biodefense or infectious diseases. Students then attend classes and weekly seminars on both campuses and pursue research in both of their mentors’ labs, which culminates into their thesis.

The biodefense training program is one of eight interdisciplinary graduate training programs offered by the 16-year-old Keck Center, which currently educates nearly 70 students, including 18 Rice students, in emerging interdisciplinary fields in the biomedical sciences, such as nanobiology, pharmacoinformatics and computational biology.

According to Karen Ethun, GCC executive director, whose office is on the Rice campus, these graduate training programs are important because the scale and complexity of today’s biomedical research problems require scientists to collaborate and have a working knowledge not only of their major field of study but also of related fields in the biological sciences.

“These programs equip young scientists with the expanded expertise to address scientific problems with different hats,” she said. “They also give them the experience of working on interdisciplinary, multi-institutional teams and to reap the benefits from these collaborations.”

Hammerstrom said that the program is well worth the extra hours in the lab and in the classroom.

“I get two sets of expertise by working with both Dr. Koehler and Dr. Nikonowicz and have become plugged into Houston’s research community,” he said. “Plus, I’m getting a lot of exercise walking between the Texas Medical Center and Rice.”

This is the first time for Koehler and Nikonowicz to be mentors in a Keck Center training program, and they, too, have greatly benefited from the collaboration.

“In our weekly lab meetings, Troy brings back information he has learned from Ed’s lab, which helps us not only with Troy’s project but in other studies we are working on,” said Koehler, the Herbert L. and Margaret W. DuPont Professor in Biomedical Science at the UT graduate school and one of the nation’s top anthrax experts. “Ed’s lab picks apart the protein and then our lab can engineer the bacterium to make altered versions of the protein and test for changes in function.”

Nikonowicz said that the collaboration has helped him to be more organism-focused and not just focused on one piece of an organism.

“In structural biology, we determine the three-dimensional shapes of proteins and nucleic acids to better understand function,” he said. “In collaborations with biomedical researchers like Terri and Troy, we are connecting the dots between structure and function to understand the interplay of molecules as parts of an entire organism.”

Nikonowicz said that these collaborations are also beneficial in renewing and obtaining new grant awards.

 “Grant reviewers need to understand the importance of our work,” he said. “That is hard to address just from a structural standpoint, but working in collaboration with biomedical researchers like Terri and Troy, we can write stronger proposals that frame our research within the context of understanding a molecule’s contribution to the physiology of an organism and that will impact treatment of diseases such as anthrax.”

Ethun said that collaborations like this one is why the GCC — whose members include Rice, Baylor College of Medicine, University of Houston, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center — was formed in 2001.

“Over the last five years, the GCC has helped Houston’s biomedical community pool together its resources, strengths and talents to score scientific breakthroughs and to train future researchers,” she said. “It’s a great model for interdisciplinary, multi-institutional research and will push Houston to the forefront of biomedical research.”

This article is the eighth in a series that highlights faculty, staff and students who embody the spirit of the Vision for the Second Century.