CAMPUS LIFE
I N TH E C LASS RO O M
Jingyu He ’15 loads a syringe with a protein that may be used to help develop a drug to treat cystic fibrosis.
Will Jones ’15 watches as Savannah Barrow ’15 fills a syringe with a protein that has multiple applications in DNA research.
PROTEINS IN SPACE
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ISS Students Grow Crystals for Cutting-Edge Drug-Discovery Research
en Indian Springs School students gather intently around Debbie McCombs at the UAB Center for Structural Biology as she examines X-ray images of protein crystals that the students have grown as a practice round for a large, NASA-sponsored research program exploring the benefits of using microgravity to help design drugs to fight cancer and debilitating diseases. The teens are competing against nine other Alabama high school teams to create crystals that will grow best in a microgravity environment, and they’re curious—and a bit apprehensive—to see if their sample proteins produced crystals. “You actually have some precipitation in these proteins,” McCombs tells them after
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studying the images. “Just remember: When you’re working in science, you have to come in and expect that what you’re going to do is going to grow. Now am I always successful? About 20% of the time. But every day I have the idea that I will succeed.”
“Through this ‘Proteins in Space’ project, we may discover a much simpler and quicker way to crystallize proteins,” says Jack McGuire ’16, who is excited to be a part of the team representing Indian Springs. “It could greatly benefit the scientific community.”
The students’ official set of protein crystals for the experiment will soon be among 100 proteins growing in a variety of buffering solutions in glass capillary tubes aboard the International Space Station. Contributed by universities, pharmaceutical companies, and the National Institutes of Health for their scientific importance, the proteins were scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center via the SpaceX CRS-3 spacecraft in mid-March and return to earth by August.
ISS Board Member Larry DeLucas, who is director of the UAB Center for Structural Biology, principal investigator of the study, and a leader in the field of protein crystallography, believes that spacebased crystallography holds important keys to structure-based drug design. “The human body contains more than 100,000 proteins that play key roles in the function of the body,” he says. “The proteins evaluated in my lab are implicated in important biological processes and are