Departmental News
Welcome our New Faculty
Welcome our New Staff
- Martha Franz
- Eliza Rodas
- Judy Ratterre
Scientist awarded more than $890,000 for oxygen deprivation research
DENTON (UNT), Texas - Lack of oxygen is one of the most challenging problems in medicine today. Several heart and lung diseases as well as trauma caused by loss of blood can result in oxygen deprivation to cells, tissues and organs. This can lead to health complications and even death. Lack of oxygen also plays a key role in preventing solid tumors from responding well to radiation and chemotherapy treatments.
Oxygen deprivation research, conducted by University of North Texas Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences Dr. Pamela Padilla, could have far-reaching effects on preventing diseased tissues from developing in humans.
Padilla was recently awarded more than $890,000 from the National Institutes of Health for a five-year study to understand how cells and genes respond to a lack of oxygen. Her research with round worms links how whole organisms react to oxygen deprivation with how cells stop dividing.
"When deprived of oxygen, some organisms learn to survive through an on-off genetic mechanism," Padilla said. "This mechanism initiates a state of suspended animation until oxygen is once again available."
Padilla said learning more about genes that control this survival mechanism could help in developing treatments for cells damaged due to lack of oxygen.
She and her colleagues were the first scientists to prove that certain proteins activated during cell development protect an organism against oxygen loss. Since this process occurs throughout the animal kingdom, her findings suggest that suspended animation may also operate similarly in humans.
The grant support awarded by NIH will allow Padilla to study specific proteins in greater detail and discover new proteins that are required to survive a loss of oxygen.
For more information about Padilla's research, see the Nov. 7, 2003 issue of Science magazine.
Padilla may be contacted at ppadilla@unt.edu.
UNT News Service Phone Number: (940) 565-2108
Contact: Cathy Cashio (940) 565-4644
UNT Biologist closer to the elusive Holy Grail of plant biology.
Poinsettias and Christmas cacti flower as the days get shorter in the fall, and many crop plants flower in the spring as days get longer. Day length (photoperiod) is perceived and measured by leaves, which then transfer a signal to the vegetative tips to induce flower formation. The molecular nature of this signal, florigen,has remained elusive despite more than 75 years of intensive effort. The effort has been so great and the problem so perplexing that identifying this signal is commonly referred to as the Holy Grail of plant biology. Now, Dr. Brian Ayre, UNT Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Science, and collaborator Dr. Robert Turgeon at Cornell University, have published their work demonstrating that a transcription factor called CONSTANS is an important intermediate in generating this much-sought-after signal 1.
Ayre and Turgeon created transgenic Arabidopsis plants, a small laboratory plant related to mustards, that express the CONSTANS gene specifically in the smallest veins of the leaves. Accelerated flowering in these plants revealed that they were on the right track, and onto something big. They then performed grafting experiments in which vegetative tips from plants that failed to express CONSTANS, and flowered very late in their life cycle, where surgically fused to the stems of their transgenic plants. Flowering initiated immediately after the graft junction healed, demonstrating the transport of a CONSTANS-derived signal from leaves to growing apices.
Identifying the florigen signal through modern biotechnology approaches will solve one of the most significant, long standing puzzles in plant science. Quotes Ayre, This is the sort of stuff that becomes standard textbook material.
1. Ayre BG, Turgeon R. (2004) Graft Transmission of a Floral Stimulant Derived from CONSTANS. Plant Physiology, 135: 2271-2278.