The University of Colorado at Boulder has been awarded a research grant of $1.4 million from the W.M. Keck Foundation for the study of two new areas of ribonucleic acid, or RNA, science.
The grant will be split equally between the chemistry and biochemistry department and the molecular, cellular and developmental biology department, said Mike Yarus, principal investigator for the grant.
"This new support from the Keck Foundation is a vote of confidence from a sophisticated partner for one of the university's eminent research and teaching programs," said Yarus, a professor of MCD biology. "This grant will help educate Colorado students in RNA science and help the CU faculty stay on the leading edge of RNA studies."
CU-Boulder is nationally and internationally known for its studies of RNA, including the work of CU faculty member Thomas Cech, also the president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Cech shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989 by showing that RNA can catalyze cellular chemical reactions.
RNA science at CU-Boulder is an enterprise that attracts about $5 million annually in government support. That support funds 10 laboratories in which 20 graduate students and 15 undergraduates work, learning alongside the faculty. CU-Boulder often is referred to by those in the field as "the RNA capital of the world."
According to Yarus, RNA is probably the most ancient among large cellular biomolecules. RNA does many essential jobs in modern cells, and has probably been doing similar biological work for billions of years. Over time, RNA molecules have become embedded in essential processes in both human cells, for example, and in their viral parasites. New roles for RNA are still being discovered by biologists.
The first area of study from the Keck gift will be the observation of single molecules of RNA. Biochemists look at tens of trillions of molecules, and take the behavior of the crowd to be typical of the underlying molecules, said Yarus. However, it has recently become possible to isolate and "interrogate" single RNA molecules to get a more refined idea of what they do.
The grant will support the construction of delicate new instruments that can "talk" to molecules one-by-one and help train students to use these new techniques. CU-Boulder is one of the few places where physicists and biological chemists will be able to collaborate on such studies.
The second area builds on the success of the Genome Project in 21st century biomedicine. Biologists now have the recipe for various creatures from bacteria to humans in the form of the nucleotide sequences written in their chromosomes. The available information from these recipes is increasing rapidly with time.
When one knows the sequence of a genome, one knows something about the structure of many or most of the RNAs encoded by that genome, said Yarus. The second part of the W.M. Keck-supported RNA science is the development of new computer software to allow biomedical researchers to find and even compute with RNA structures within this rising sea of information.
Based in Los Angeles, the W.M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 by the late W.M. Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Co. The foundation's grantmaking is focused primarily on pioneering efforts in the areas of medical research, science and engineering. The foundation also maintains a program to support undergraduate science and humanities education and a Southern California Grant Program that provides support in the areas of health care, civic and community services, education and the arts, with a special emphasis on children. For more information about the W.M. Keck Foundation visit the foundation's Web site at .
The CU-Boulder grant will be funded via the University of Colorado Foundation, an independent, privately governed nonprofit organization that raises and manages private support for the benefit of the University of Colorado.