The College of Science and Technology Office of the Dean recently introduced Boost Funds for New Research Directions, a new initiative intended to help CST faculty invigorate their research programs. The first awardees are Robert Stanley, professor in the Department of Chemistry, and Stephen MacNeil, assistant professor in the CIS Department.
Intended for faculty members who do not currently hold external or internal funding, boost funds will support faculty who want to explore a new area of research or jumpstart research activity. Each two-year seed grant provides support for a faculty member to conduct preliminary analyses, demonstrate proof of concept, collect preliminary data, and establish the high potential impact of the proposed idea for future proposal submissions.
Stanley’s project, “Dually Fluorescent Reporters of Metabolic Flavoprotein Redox,” is the focus of this article, with an earlier story detailing MacNeil’s project.
“There is a big push to image metabolic processes in living cells in real time with high spatial resolution to better track and understand how metabolism is co-opted by disease,” explained Stanley. “Proteins use a Vitamin B2 derivative called Flavin Adenine Dinucleotide, or FAD, which plays a huge role in our metabolic balance. FAD is a target for metabolic imaging because it is naturally fluorescent, which allows it to be imaged in living cells, but several metabolically important states of FAD do not fluoresce, or only weakly so.”
Stanley’s lab has developed a new general approach to address this information gap. Replacing adenine in FAD with a fluorescent analog, these “iFADs”will “glow” under conditions where the flavin goes dark. “These fluorescence changes will report on whether critical Vitamin B2-dependent proteins and enzymes are fulfilling their metabolic roles in the cell,” said Stanley.
“I am very enthusiastic about Dr. Stanley’s idea of developing new tools to image the semiquinone and hydroquinone states of flavoproteins, which has not been possible with the current tools,” said Miguel Mostafá, CST dean. “This would be an enabling technology. I am convinced that this seed funding will allow Dr. Stanley to produce an experimental proof of principle of the specific biological target for this new redox probe. Pivoting to in vivo demonstration of transfection of human cells with iFAD, followed by fluorescence imaging, will certainly increase his chances with both NSF and NIH.”
For Stanley, boost funds are invaluable to moving iFAD research forward. “We are currently unfunded, with the result that progress on our iFAD project is quite slow,” Stanley said. “Using boost funds will accelerate our work, providing us with the preliminary results needed to present new findings to the scientific community.”
According to Stanley, feedback on previous NSF and NIH proposals has been very favorable. “However, the agencies require a little more proof of our hypothesis before supporting our research,” he said. “We hope to resubmit substantially stronger iFAD proposals within a year.”