Internship at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, UMDNJ
Jan 17 - Feb 16, 2011
Ryo Uehara, 1st year PhD student, Kanaya Laboratory,
Department of Material and Lifescience, Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University
For this internship program, I contacted Dr. Inouye, a professor in Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. In the laboratory, a lot of studies for subtilisin, a protein in which I'm really interested, have been performed during the past decade. I joined his laboratory and discussed for the further work using Tksubtilisin that I deal with.
In this collaboration work, I tried to construct the chimeric protein that consists of propeptide-domain from bacteria and subtilisin-domain from archaeron. The purpose of this work is to investigate the folding of Tk-subtilisin catalyzed by uncognate propeptide and find protein memory phenomenon which mechanism has been determined as proposed by Dr. Inouye (Nature, 1997). Finally, I constructed chimeric protein, termed ProE-Tk-subtilisin, and analyzed the maturation mechanism. When ProE-Tk-subtilisin was
activated at 40, it didnft exhibit the folding catalyzed by uncognate propeptide and any protein memory phenomenon, suggesting the propeptide-subtilisin interaction is more complicate than expected, and further efforts to clarify these phenomenon are necessary. Additionally, during my stay, I fortunately watched the defense seminar of PhD student who study subtilisin same as I. After the seminar, I discussed with him personally.
Through the one-month internship program, I got a lot of opportunities to discuss and communicate with people who have differential research fields. I do believe they contribute to not only expansion of my knowledge but also development of my research in near future.
