MSU protein research could pave way for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease treatment

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It is rare that a single paper changes the horizon of science.

Instead, Wolfgang Bauer said scientists — including MSU researchers — publish countless papers and results that slowly push science toward a different direction.

One such paper, examining protein folding, was published last week in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS, which showed proteins fold into their structures more slowly than previously thought.

The research — partially funded by a National Science Foundation grant — used cutting-edge technology that was developed at MSU, said Bauer, chairperson of MSU’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

The process of protein folding means a one-dimensional chain of amino acids wiggles around until it transforms into a three-dimensional protein, which is used for countless processes in the body, including DNA, hormones and muscles.

“It’s not a game-changer, like Einstein’s theory of relativity was, but it really points us to new ways in understanding how proteins fold, which is very important stuff,” Bauer said.

Lisa Lapidus, assistant professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, collaborated with recent MSU alumnus Steven Waldauer, who used the paper as his dissertation and is a researcher from the Center for Biophotonics Science and Technology at University of California, Davis, or UC Davis, near Sacramento, Calif.

“PNAS is a pretty prestigious journal,” Waldauer said. “I was really excited to have it published in something like that.”

If protein folding goes awry, the accumulation of misfolded proteins leads to disease, such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and mad cow disease, Lapidus said.

“If we want to understand these diseases that affect millions of people, we have to understand protein folding,” she said.

The process of protein folding occurs in fractions of a second and no one understands exactly how it occurs, Lapidus said.

“Protein folding is a very interesting physical problem,” she said. “I’m in the physics department — I like problems that are fascinating and hard to solve.”

The research was unique in that it scaled everything down to micron dimensions, so that the unfolding process could better be observed. The team utilized a microfluidic mixer — developed at MSU and UC Davis — to get the proteins on the verge of folding, then used laser technology that Lapidus developed about 10 years ago that allowed them to watch the folding in microseconds.

“It wasn’t intuitive to find out that they moved slower,” Waldauer said. “This unfolded state is more important than what people thought it was.”

MSU has made great efforts to attract biophysicists, such as Lapidus, to the university, Bauer said.

“Biophysics is one of the — what I would call — frontier sciences,” Bauer said. “We expect major, major advances over the next decade.”

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