Postdoctoral fellow Wade Zeno has received a Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award from the National Institutes of Health. Zeno works in the lab of Jeanne Stachowiak, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, and received his PhD in chemical engineering from the University of California, Davis.
The fellowship will provide two years of funding for Zeno’s research project titled “Intrinsically Disordered Proteins as Sensors of Membrane Curvature." This research investigates how intrinsically disordered proteins, which lack the structure of regular proteins, can function as a new method of sensing membrane curvature.
“For the longest time, people thought that only proteins with structure could carry out different tasks,” Wade says. “We just discovered that these intrinsically disordered proteins can still carry out a function, which is sensing membrane curvature. The questions became, how does this protein, that doesn’t have any specific features or structure, carry out something like this?”
Zeno hopes for his research in this unexplored area to increase fundamental understanding of the mechanism behind intrinsically disordered proteins and membrane-bending. Down the line, this new knowledge could be applied to the development of therapeutics for different diseases.
