$1 Million Grant to Accelerate UB Studies of Cell Protein Structures Implicated In Diseases

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The California-based W.M. Keck Foundation has given a $1 million grant to the University at Buffalo that will move UB to the forefront in single-molecule and biomedical research.

The grant will allow a team of researchers in the UB School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences to purchase high-speed computers that will accelerate greatly their studies of the activity of ion channels, protein structures that regulate the flow of electrical current in cells.

The UB researchers -- Frederick Sachs, Ph.D., and Anthony L. Auerbach, Ph.D., professors of physiology and biophysics, and Feng Qin, Ph.D., research assistant professor of physiology and biophysics -- are the developers of groundbreaking software programs that are revolutionizing the way that scientists interpret the activity of ion channels, many of which are implicated in diseases.

UB President William R. Greiner announced today that the $1 million grant will fund creation of the W.M. Keck Foundation Center for Computational Biology.

"Thanks to the Keck Foundation, the University at Buffalo will be able to conduct path-breaking research in biomedical science for years to come," Greiner said.

"UB is proud to be the first and only public campus in New York State to receive assistance from the Keck Foundation, which is world-renowned for its support of innovative research in science, engineering and biomedical science. It was a great honor for UB to be awarded this support from the Keck Foundation.

"This grant provides recognition of the important work being done by Frederick Sachs, Anthony Auerbach and Feng Qin, and enhances our position as one of America's major research universities."

Provost David J. Triggle noted that "the ability to measure, visualize, manipulate and probe individual molecules, as opposed to populations of molecules, represents one of the most dramatic recent advances in science. It is not coincident that the March 12 issue of Science, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was devoted to single molecules.

"The program that Professors Sachs and Auerbach are proposing enables them to study the structure and function of complex large molecules, such as ion channels, that form the very basis of why we and our component cells are excitable and responsive systems."

Sachs noted, "With high-performance computers, we will be able to solve the properties of single molecules more than 100 times faster than we now can and to a resolution that has not even been possible before."

The result will be a far greater understanding of ion channels, many of which are implicated in diseases.

"If we can understand these molecules and how they change shape over time, we can understand how they function," said Sachs. "When a protein's motions are abnormal, they can cause disease. The proteins we study are used to send signals throughout the body and when they malfunction, they can cause any number of serious clinical symptoms, such as weakness, paralysis, spastic behavior or cardiac arrest."

The UB researchers are the developers of software programs that are revolutionizing the way that scientists interpret ion-channel activity, which is so complex and time-consuming that until recently, many researchers simply gave up on it. With their "QUB" software, researchers around the world are able to discover in minutes how long it takes for an ion channel to change shape. Previously such calculations would have taken months.

According to Sachs, it was actually Feng Qin, at the time a UB graduate student Sachs describes as "brilliant," who developed the algorithms on which the software is based.

"For 20 years, scientists have been collecting data on the random movements of molecules, but they didn't know how to interpret this information," said Auerbach. "Qin made several breakthroughs and now the analysis is relatively easy."

Scientists and software vendors have responded positively to the methods the UB team developed and the instructional workshops that they hold are well-attended.

"Our programs are becoming the 'gold standard' for ion-channel research," said Auerbach. "The Keck grant is important to our future because it provides us with computing power that that will allow us to push the limits of molecular dynamics."

Besides ion channels, the programs also are applicable to the study of many other important biological and chemical problems, such as characterizations of the force between fundamental contraction units of muscle.

The researchers intend to link PCs together with high-speed networks in a cluster, an approach that duplicates supercomputing capabilities at low cost, in order to achieve the necessary computational power.

Roxanne Ford, medical research program director of the W.M. Keck Foundation, said, "In its science and medical-research programs, the foundation has long focused on supporting cutting-edge research and the development of new technologies that may lead to breakthrough achievements in a particular field. In this light, we are very proud to support the single-molecule kinetics work of Drs. Sachs and Auerbach at UB."

The Keck Foundation grant fits into an ongoing structural-biology initiative of the university and builds on other recent corporate grants that are helping to make UB one of the top-10 academic supercomputing sites in the U.S.

The W.M. Keck Foundation, one of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations, was founded in 1954 by the late W.M. Keck, founder of the Superior Oil Co. The foundation's grant-making is focused primarily on pioneering efforts in the areas of higher education, medical research, science and engineering.