Science Changing Exploration
In 2018, a team of NASA astronomers shared a photo of Icarus, an individual star 9 billion light-years from Earth. It was the most distant star ever seen, and it was the Hubble telescope that enabled its discovery. To a structural biologist, the body is its own universe. Within each cell, each uncharacterized protein, peptide, enzyme or lipid represents an undiscovered new world no less awesome than the stars and planets. Like astronauts or explorers of old, structural biologists seek out unexplored terrain. If the great Greek cartographer Ptolemy had lived today, he might have chosen structural biology for his life’s quest. Microscopes, rather than telescopes or ships, open these new worlds to modern-day explorers of inner space.
A new world
Viewing a protein’s structure for the first time—seeing its arrangement of atoms, how it folds into origami-like shapes and how those shapes dictate the protein’s role in the living organism—that’s the thrill of discovery that motivates Florida-based biologist Tina Izard, PhD. “The first time I saw a three-dimensional structure, it just took my breath away,” Izard says. Using a specialized technique called cryo-electron microscopy, Izard recently enjoyed yet another first, seeing the structure of a protein critical to a healthy heart and implicated in heart aging and stiffness. Known as metavinculin, the protein tethers the cardiac cell’s membrane to the matrix within.
THE HEART OF AN EXPLORER 16
SCRIPPS RESEARCH MAGAZINE | WINTER/SPRING 2020
