Honors and Awards

She is among 20 other current UCSC faculty members who are fellows of the academy, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary societies. Professor Strome is a developmental biologist whose research focuses on germ cells, the cells that give rise to eggs and sperm. Germ cells have special properties: their immortality allows them to be perpetuated from generation to generation, and their “totipotency” allows them to generate all of the diverse cell types of the body in each generation. Strome’s laboratory uses a tiny worm (C. elegans) to study the molecular mechanisms that regulate germ cell development. She has had continuous funding for her research from the National Institutes of Health and additional funding from the American Cancer Society, National Science Foundation, and Guggenheim Foundation. She joined the UCSC MCD Biology faculty in 2007.

This year’s grant recipients, Lindsay Hinck, Ph.D., professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology, along with Sharmila Chatterjee, Ph.D., a postdoctoral scholar, are working on basic research that could identify potential pathways to higher milk production in dairy cattle.

Dr. Hinck’s research lab studies mammary gland development and stem cell biology, focusing primarily on human breast cancer.

“I had never thought about the practical role our research could play in the dairy industry,” Dr. Hinck said. “It turns out that our investigation into regulatory mechanisms governing mammary stem cells can directly translate to milk production. This is a new and exciting direction for our research program.”

Needhi Bhalla: Nuclear Organization and Regulation of Meiotic Recombination

Loss of reproductive fitness is a hallmark of aging, whether in from yeast or in humans. Not only does aging result in fewer progeny, it can also affect “quality of life”—literally in this case, as progeny that are produced late in life may be inviable or otherwise less fit. Women over a certain age are at a higher risk for miscarriages or bearing children with developmental disorders, such as Down and Klinefelter’s syndromes. We also know that he offspring of older fathers have a higher risk of neurodevelopmental disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism. Yet, little is known about the molecular mechanisms that underlie these phenomena. Bhalla is convinced that the misregulation of events in meiosis are likely contributors to these problems.

Meiosis is a specialized cell division in which a diploid cell gives rise to haploid gametes, such as eggs and sperm. To ensure that chromosomes segregate appropriately during meiosis, homologous chromosomes undergo recombination, the exchange of genetic material. Bhalla’s lab has producedevidence that proteins associated with the nuclear envelope regulate meiotic recombination. These proteins often localize chromosomal loci to the periphery of the nucleus. This evidence led Bhalla to speculate that the large-scale organization of chromosomes within the nucleus affects recombination. More importantly, defects in these and other proteins at the nuclear envelope have been linked to aging and there is a growing body of literature linking loss of nuclear integrity with aging.

Bhalla believes that a potential explanation for loss of reproductive fitness lies in misregulation of meiotic recombination in response to aging-induced loss of nuclear integrity. Her lab will use Ellison support to characterize the role of nuclear organization in regulating meiotic recombination, 2) assess meiotic recombination in aging animals, as well as in mutants that extend and shorten lifespan, and 3) identify additional factors involved in age-dependent regulation of meiotic recombination. We perform our experiments using the nematode worm C. elegans as a model organism, which provides genetic, biochemical and cytological tools to address the question of how aging affects meiotic recombination and genomic stability. 

Jeremy Sanford: Post Transcriptional Control of Gene Expression

Accumulation of somatic mutations during our life history contributes to the stochastic nature of aging and plays a key role in the onset of disease. Sanford and his laboratory try to understand how mutations induce disease phenotypes, a question directly relevant to many aspects of aging research. For their Ellison research, they are investigating the hypothesis that disease-causative point mutations induce aberrant processing of messenger RNA by disrupting the specificity of protein-RNA interactions. The first step towards elucidating the impact of disease-causing mutations is to map sites of RNA-protein interactions occurring in the context of living cells. These comprehensive maps are used to identify disease-causing mutations with the potential to abolish or create protein-binding sites within RNA transcripts. Sanford and his colleagues create computational predictions of toxic RNA elements, with the predictions validated in the laboratory, using patient-derived cell lines to assay RNA processing of the endogenous disease-gene. Sanford is convinced that work in this area will improve our understanding of the basic mechanisms governing gene expression and directly translate to improved diagnosis and treatment of aging related diseases.

Yi Zuo’s innovative research on the nervous system has attracted funding from three major foundations since her arrival at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in January. The Ellison Medical Foundation and the American Federation for Aging Research (AFAR) are the most recent organizations to award research grants to Zuo, an assistant professor of molecular, cell, and developmental biology. Earlier this year, she was one of three UCSC faculty members selected to receive research fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (see story).

Zuo will receive $200,000 over four years as an Ellison Medical Foundation New Scholar in Aging, and the AFAR award will provide an additional $60,000 in funding. The grants support Zuo’s research on changes in the nervous system related to aging. In particular, she is interested in the interaction between two types of cells in the nervous system: neurons and glia. Although glia outnumber neurons, scientists are only beginning to understand the roles they play in the neural circuitry.

“Any information we can learn about the role of glia is very useful, because so little is known about them,” Zuo said.

Her lab is investigating the interaction between neurons and glia at the synapses, the specialized junctions through which neurons communicate with each other and with other cell types, such as those in muscles and glands. Structural changes and functional declines are known to occur at synapses in both normal aging and neurodegenerative diseases. Changes in the glial cells may be an important factor in age-related changes in synapses, Zuo said.

The two new grants will support a research program focusing on the simplest synapse in the nervous system, the neuromuscular junction, which connects motor neurons and muscle cells. Zuo uses sophisticated microscopic imaging techniques that enable her to observe individual neuromuscular junctions in living mice repeatedly over the life span of the mouse. This technique allows the researchers in Zuo’s lab to monitor the same neuromuscular synapse and its associated glia during the aging process.

“We will examine the dynamic nature of the synapse and the sequence of events that lead to aging-related structural changes in neuromuscular junctions, and determine if glial changes lead to synaptic changes,” Zuo said.

Ultimately, the insights gained from this research could lead to the identification of glia as a novel therapeutic target in dealing with problems associated with the aging neuromuscular system.

Zuo earned her B.S. in biology at Tsinghua University in Beijing and her Ph.D. in neuroscience at Northwestern University. Before joining the UCSC faculty, she held postdoctoral positions at New York University and the University of Texas at Austin.

The Ellison Medical Foundation supports basic biomedical research on aging relevant to understanding life-span development processes and age-related diseases and disabilities. The American Federation for Aging Research supports the science of healthier aging, funding research on the fundamental mechanisms of aging by providing start-up grants to scientists early in their careers.