When Cells Talk, He Listens
Jordan Gerton | University of Utah
For Jordan Gerton, one kind of adventure is skiing Utah’s Wasatch
Mountains outside his lab window at the University of Utah. Another is
still a dream: listening in on how a cell gets life-or-death messages from
things that float by, and peering inside the cell to watch events unfold,
and maybe, one day, influencing those events.
He expects his tools, which provide images down to billionths of a meter,
will show more than anyone’s ever seen of the inner drama of a cell. The
impact could be profound. “It may open a whole new world for biological
problems and systems,” he said.
Still from video showing a “nanohand” — a small gripper, small enough to manipulate nanotubes and nanofibres.
Here’s how it works. You grow a cell and put it on a glass cover
slip. You put the slip on a microscope and see the smaller parts. What
you can’t
see is the individual proteins that make up the cell. Even super microscopes
lack the power to see proteins in action, inside the cell. “We
have a technique to let you look at things that small, to see differences
between molecules inside a cell membrane.”
Cell messages come in the form of a few proteins dropping by with timely
information. A
little bunch of them bind to a protein complex and set off signals. Should the
cell get active? Replicate? Die? “Some important event is about to
happen inside the cell,” Gerton said. “What’s that going to
look like?” He hopes to watch the cell membrane’s parts more
closely than has ever been possible.
At his lab in Utah, on the top floors of the Intermountain Network and
Scientific Computation Center, he’s near vast computer resources, colleagues from
many disciplines and seven ski resorts. Ideas do generate on the slopes,
but he can’t contemplate protein molecules while on a run. “I’m
not a good enough skier for that,” he says.
He traces his work ethic came to his days as a collegiate swimmer at the
University of Arizona and tells his students to combine such interests
with doing creative science. In his case, he branched off from his early
training in physics. During a post-doc at Cal Tech, the meetings with other
scientists stirred a passion for technology and biology applications –
especially cells, and the molecules inside their walls. Those walls form
vital barriers. “But the cool
thing is how a cell communicates with the outside world,” he says “It
imports nutrients, exports waste, gets information, processes it and reacts
to the environment.” The key is the molecules within the membrane.
It’s a bit like a computer taking input, combining and by its logic
coming up with an output. His cell research will isolate the inputs.
What’s
the parallel to a keystroke, a command? How does the architecture
control how a cell reacts? In biology, that’s called a structure-function
relationship. And then, how to extend that logic to control the cell? How
to have a cell behave – or
not behave – a certain way, to avoid, say, getting a disease or acting
cell-crazy.
“Others don’t have this access to individual inputs,” he says. “We
think we can get that measure of control. That’s what we are working
toward, as an ultimate goal.”
Gerton recalls being stirred by the 1959 speech by Richard Feynman, the
physicist, that predicted nanoscience. “He said if you can have a better microscope,
you will learn more by looking at stuff. You don’t know where it might
lead. But something interesting is going to happen. There is a little
of that exploration here if we do this.”
Nov. 1, 2007
