Sweet times in biology
NEWS @ Wheaton, February 2006
By Michael Graca
Students working with biology professor Bob Morris this spring are earning a small measure of immortality by joining a worldwide group of about 300 researchers working to identify the more than 20,000 genes of the purple sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.
With help from professors Betsey Dyer (Biology) and Mark LeBlanc (Computer Science), Morris recruited more than 20 students to join an international network of researchers collaborating on annotation of the sea urchin genome. The process of annotation allows scientists to identify each gene, the first step toward determining the purpose of each gene sequence in the animal's development.
Scientists became interested in the sea urchin as a model system for animal development more than a century ago. "That's because they're easy to acquire, easy to keep, and easy on the eyes; their development is just beautiful to watch,' says Morris, whose primary research involves the study of how cells, sea urchin included, divide and grow.
The sea urchin offers something even more important, though, than laboratory convenience. It shares a surprising number of genetic traits with human beings, similarities that could have important implications for future advances in medicine.
"The embryonic development of the sea urchin is similar in fundamental ways to the development of human embryos," Morris explains. "The fertilized egg of the sea urchin is the ultimate stem cell."
Complete annotation of the sea urchin genome may offer researchers important clues about how human stem cells can be used to develop certain types of tissue-a capability that promises to revolutionize medical care for patients with Parkinson's disease, severe burns and a host of other ailments.
"We already know more about the genetic networks in the sea urchin than just about any other organism," Morris added, explaining that the basic annotation research he is doing with students has great significance. In fact, an upcoming issue of the journal Developmental Biology will be devoted to the sea urchin annotation effort. One of the 20 papers to be published in that issue will be authored by Morris and his student research assistants.
Morris started the sea urchin genome annotation research (SUGAR) process last November with a Friday night party, featuring pizza, soda, home-made brownies and long sequences of genetic material that students and professors pored over for the patterns that would signal the location of specific genes.
"What a fantastic night," Morris wrote in a midnight e-mail to his student assistants after that first marathon evening of genetic mapping. "You all cranked through two-thirds of that monstrous list of proteins we have on our to-do list. (Out of about 350 proteins, we found first matches to the urchin GLEAN3 genes for about 230!!) That is way farther than I could have hoped we would get."
Since then, Morris has held several more SUGAR parties and assigned the final stages of work to students in his neurobiology class this spring. For their efforts, students know that their names will be permanently recorded as part of the record of the sea urchin genome. But the real incentive for the students was the chance to put their academic work to the test in an international research effort.
Ashlan Musante '08 was enthused to find an alpha-helix domain (a common three-dimensional folding pattern of proteins) that Professor Morris had talked about in the cell biology class she took with him last year.
"We talked about the alpha helix extensively in cell biology. To see it in the amino acid sequence from the DNA of a real organism was very cool," said the biochemistry major from Shelton, Conn. "It was the perfect culmination of everything I've learned so far."