January 8, 2004

Mad Yeast to Mad Cow?

With the current commotion over bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE) or mad cow disease raging out west, the next speaker in the Medical Biotechnology Center’s seminar series is particularly timely. Dr. Reed B. Wickner, Chief of the Laboratory of Biochemistry and Genetics at the National Institute for Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH, is an expert in prions, the infectious agent in BSE, however, he does not study those found in cows but rather yeast. His talk entitled, “Yeast Prions: Proteins Can Be Genes,” will focus on the elements necessary for amyloid formation and how prions can usurp the cellular machinery.

Prions are actually normal proteins gone bad. Instead of behaving as they should, they misfold, self-replicate and recruit good protein to join in the formation of amyloid plaques, accumulating until the cell dies from the load of undigestible bad protein. The exact mechanism of this change from the normal form to the infectious form is not well understood nor is the normal role for the good form of some of the prion proteins known. Dr. Wickner’s work on yeast prions has been seminal to our current understanding of prions and prion disease. The normal roles for yeast prion proteins are known and the organism is well characterized genetically. Thus, his laboratory has begun dissecting the mechanism for the formation of “bad” protein. The implications for mammalian disease are significant, though it will be some time before they are of practical benefit.

Dr. Wickner has his M.D. degree from Georgetown University and was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2000. He was elected to the Academy at the same time as UMBI’s first president, Dr. Rita Colwell, and two of this year’s Nobel Prize winners, Dr. Roderick McKinnon and Dr. Peter Agre.

The seminar will be held Tuesday, January 13 at 12 noon in the 6th floor conference room of UMBI’s Medical Research Facility, 725 W. Lombard St.

The University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute was mandated by the state of Maryland legislature in 1985 as "a new paradigm of state economic development in biotech-related sciences." With five major research and education centers across Maryland, UMBI is dedicated to advancing the frontiers of biotechnology. The centers are the Center for Advanced Research in Biotechnology in Rockville; Center for Biosystems Research in College Park; and Center of Marine Biotechnology, Medical Biotechnology Center, and the Institute of Human Virology, all in Baltimore.