Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. A school of hippies? You might say that. A place for openness and acceptance, where people can speak their mind without fear of harassment or persecution? Only depending on your point of view, of course. A school that conducts first-rate scientific research and has world-renowned graduates in the fields of biology, chemistry and astronomy (to name just a few)? You would never know it walking around this campus, but it’s true. Yes, that’s right, we are a university for a reason.
Unless you have found yourself sitting in a five-hour organic chemistry lab or are actually excited to start highlighting one of those $150 textbooks you buy each semester, most likely you have no idea what is going on in those three buildings on the other side of Church Street. Where is Hall-Atwater, again? Wesleyan is not just a school whose graduates make movies about meat throwing, star in presidential dramas on TV or design Broadway shows based around men in blue paint. It’s a place that produces scientists, some of whom have moved on to be the first to identify the HIV virus or a new galaxy in space. You may not see their names in the credits or read their books, but they’re Cardinals just the same.
As a psychology major I am somewhat of a straddler, finding myself on the fence between the social sciences and lab sciences. I understand the scientific method and how to conduct research, but like most of the Wesleyan population (I’m guessing), I have no idea what kinds of research are going on here or how important it is in the world of science. The point of this column, if you’re still wondering, is to expose some of the more interesting and prominent research that is being conducted here at Wesleyan. Under the assumption that some of you may not even know that we have a molecular biology and biochemistry major, I thought I would conduct some interviews and find out what is really going on in those test tube-filled, seemingly windowless rooms some students call home.
Last week I sat down with Professor Ishita Mukerji, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry. She and her students study, among other things, sickle cell anemia, a disease that inhibits the transport of oxygen by changing the shape of our hemoglobin. Using an analogy Professor Mukerji relayed to me, the problem with sickle cell is this- it’s as if your normal hemoglobin were ping-pong balls, smooth and able to move fluidly around one another when they come in contact. Someone who has sickle cell has ping-pong balls with Velcro on them, so when one hemoglobin comes into contact with another hemoglobin, the two stick together. So the process goes, and eventually they form a chain of hemoglobin fiber as opposed to being separate hemoglobin molecules.
Professor Mukerji answered some questions about the research she conducts with her students here at Wesleyan:
If you were telling a sophomore English major about the type of research you do, how would you explain it to them?
Our main focus right now is on sickle cell hemoglobin, where the hemoglobin molecules have a mutation which causes them to stick together and make long fibers, which leads to sickle cell disease. We’re looking at what it is that causes these protein molecules to start to stick together. We want to understand the process from the structure of the protein and from the way they associate in order to figure out ways to stop the association.
What are some unique things about the sickle cell research going on at Wesleyan?
We use a very specialized and distinctive technique called Resonance Raman Spectroscopy, which allows us to look at these fibers as a whole. One of the problems in studying fibers like sickle cell fibers or Alzheimer’s fibers is that the fibers get so big they’re hard to study on a molecular or atomic level. We aren’t limited by the size and we can get molecular information about the fibers and the interactions that cause them to form.
How has the research from Wesleyan’s labs been accepted in the field of MB&B? Were people surprised to see what you guys found?
People have been very interested in our results because it’s not easy to study these fibers on a molecular level. We have been able to add new information to what’s already out there. So far, we haven’t found anything controversial, so people are not really surprised by our results. We do have a new set of results coming out from the lab in a more controversial area that I think will be very interesting to people working on sickle cell disease.
What are your hopes for the direction your research will take in the next five years?
One of the techniques we would like to use in the future is being able to look at fiber formation in real time, so we can see exactly how they form and what is happening on a molecular level. Another thing I would like to see happen is to expand our research to other diseases such as mad cow disease and Alzheimer’s.
For more information on Professor Mukerji’s research, please visit their website at http://www.sicklecellinfo.net.
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