NJIT professor receives $340,000 NIH grant to investigate membrane proteins

May 3 2012

NJIT Associate Professor Edgardo Farinas has been awarded today a three-year $340,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant to investigate spores as a protein display platform for the directed evolution of membrane proteins.

"My long-term objective is to engineer proteins designed to order. My more specific aim is to stabilize G protein-coupled receptors which are membrane proteins and are involved in almost every physiological process," said Farinas.

These proteins transmit most cellular responses across cell membranes through a vast array of extracellular stimuli, which include small molecules, light, proteins, peptides, hormones, and ions. To see more about membrane proteins, see Farinas on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01_X_s-ih3Y.

Irregular control of these proteins can lead to pathological conditions. As a result, they are major drug targets, and make up greater than 50 percent of the current human therapeutic market with annual revenue in excess of $50 billion.

Determining the three-dimensional structure is necessary to investigate the molecular details of activation/deactivation. However, there are few structures available because these proteins are difficult to crystallize. For instance, they suffer stability problems due to flexibility. Hence, a robust and efficient protein engineering system is needed to optimize these proteins for structural determination.

Farinas' research will optimize these proteins using a random approach that mimics natural evolution in a test tube. The method is called directed or laboratory evolution. The unstable protein is the parent and a library of these protein offsprings will be created. The library will be screened for a desired fitness-stability, in this case. Once a winner is identified, it becomes the parent for another round of laboratory evolution. This is done in iterate cycles until the desired fitness is achieved.

In 2008, Farinas received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for his project "New Tools for High-Throughput Screening of Protein Libraries: Engineering Metalloproteins Displayed on Bacillus Subtilis Spores." The prestigious career award recognizes teacher-scholars most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century. In 2010, he was awarded patent 7691616 B2 for his work entitled: "Cytochrome P450 Oxygenases." 

Source: New Jersey Institute of Technology