To further support his research efforts, Dr. Chance and the Case Western Reserve Center for Proteomics and Bioinformatics received a four-year grant totaling $1.1 million from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB). The grant work will be performed in collaboration with Krzysztof Palczewski, PhD, chair of the Department of Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve University, and Dr. Gupta, instructor at the Case Center for Synchrotron Biosciences (CSB) in New York. Dr. Chance is also the director of the CSB, which provides unique facilities to carry out protein footprinting experiments on GPCRs and their complexes.

"Determining the structure of membrane proteins like GPCRs is particularly difficult, while understanding how drugs function to turn them on and off is even harder, but very important to treating major diseases like depression, heart failure, and diabetes," Dr. Chance said of his research. "Our techniques have provided novel insight into addressing these questions and this funding from the NIH will accelerate these studies."

With this funding, Dr. Chance and co-investigators will continue their development of new biotechnology methods to study GPCRs. The aim of their research is as follows:

To improve their mass spectrometry based structural imaging technology 1,000-fold in an effort to better understand how GCPRs are activated and signal information to protein receptors To develop a novel oxygen-18 based water labeling technique to examine the locations and dynamics of structural waters and the exchange properties of bulk water in multiple biological states of interest To improve detection efficiency in current protein footprinting experiments in hopes of enhancing the number of amino acids routinely detected To develop an algorithmic formula in relation to current footprinting data to determine the outlines of different protein structures

Drs. Chance, Palczewski, Gupta and others have previously published their footprinting/GPCR research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: Case Western Reserve University