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Can of worms may be key for top notch university
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MINNEAPOLIS (November 22, 1997 00:59 a.m. EST http://www.nando.net) -- It's
a tiny worm with an elephantine name: Caenorhabditis elegans.

No bigger than the commas on this page, the graceful little nematode is a
giant in the field of cell biology and genetics.

Next year, scientists will finish mapping its genetic makeup, making C.
elegans the most complex organism yet to have its DNA structure unraveled.

By playing with its genes, scientists have produced at least 2,800
variations of the nematode, including worms that are paralyzed, worms that
move strangely and worms that live twice as long as normal.

Eventually such work could lead to treatment for such conditions as
Alzheimer's disease. It's the kind of basic research that University of
Minnesota President Mark Yudof wants to see more of.

That's why the university is asking the state for more than $70 million to
build an Institute for Molecular and Cellular Biology on the Minneapolis
campus and to hire additional faculty members in those areas.

Yudof wants the university, which now ranks about 34th nationally in
molecular and cellular biology, to become one of the top five public
research universities in the field within the next decade.

Pitching the idea to the Board of Regents last month, Yudof said the
biology initiative was probably the most expensive proposal he will make as
president.

It's needed not only for the university, he said, but for the economy and
for the future of the science-related businesses in Minnesota known as
Medical Alley.

"This is extremely high-stakes for the University of Minnesota; it's hard
to overestimate its importance," Yudof told the board.

"Medical Alley, in my judgment . . . is going to be highly dependent on
these sort of breakthroughs. We want it to happen in Minnesota."

The proposal has support from Gov. Arne Carlson, who endorsed the biology
initiative as part of its budget requests to next year's Legislature.

While university scientists are ecstatic about the plan, it has gotten
mixed reviews from other parts of the university that are hungry for funding.

Richard Leppert, chairman of the university's Department of Cultural
Studies and Comparative Literature, said Yudof is wise to target big-ticket
items early in his presidency.

But liberal arts departments need money and a rebuilding strategy soon, he
said, or the university's rankings will slip further.

If the university is looking for an area to invest in, it couldn't pick a
better area than molecular and cellular biology, said Ralph Yount,
president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology.

"This is the area where the greatest advances are being made, because we
have the tools to look at biology in detail now," said Yount, a professor
of biochemistry and chemistry at Washington State University.

"You're going to get genetic coding for all the important model systems --
bacteria, yeast, the fruit fly -- and the information is just going to be
overwhelming."

Victor Bloomfield, biochemistry professor in the university's College of
Biological Sciences, agrees.

"Modern biology is the science of the latter part of the 20th century and
the first part of the 21st century," he said.

"If we want to be a great university, we've got to be great in biology."

Other universities have targeted biology with success.

The University of Colorado, now ranked fifth among public universities in
the National Research Council's biochemistry and molecular biology
rankings, restructured biology about 20 years ago, Yount said.

The University of California system, which has three of its campuses in the
top five public universities in the field, built powerhouse departments
over the past 30 years.

"They saw where the future lay, and they built it," Bloomfield said.

The University of Minnesota has a distinguished research history, but many
of its most lauded discoveries -- the aircraft flight recorder, the
retractable seat belt, taconite processing, isolation of uranium 235 in a
mass spectrometer, the first heart pacemaker -- occurred years or even
decades ago.

While university researchers are turning out new crop and ornamental
plants, breaking ground in engineering and working on such innovations as a
bioartificial liver, College of Biological Sciences Dean Bob Elde said the
richest source for pioneering work lies in "curiosity-driven" research, the
fundamental work that yields unpredictable discoveries.

It's the sort of thing that's going on in the university's "worm labs,"
where Bob Herman, a professor of genetics and cell biology, has studied
developmental genetics in C. elegans for more than 20 years under National
Institutes of Health (NIH) grants.

One of the things Herman and other researchers are investigating is how the
worm's cells pass signals to each other.

As they grow and develop, cells need to know where they are in relation to
each other.

Researchers have been trying to figure out how the signals sent from cell
to cell change the cells' behavior.

Each signal, which helps determine whether the cell becomes, for example, a
muscle or a nerve cell, is encoded by a gene.

The worm has just 17,000 genes, compared with an estimated 65,000 to
100,000 in people.

But most human genes bear a similarity to one of the worm's genes.

If researchers can figure out what causes genes to misfire in the worm, the
reason may explain why genes malfunction in people and cause things like
tumors.

Such connections already are being made.

After discovering a mutation in a fruit fly -- Yount called them "little
men with wings" -- researchers removed a similar gene from mice.

Those mice developed Gorlin's Syndrome, a rare condition, named after a
University of Minnesota professor, that is linked to skin cancer and brain
tumors.

"It's like one step from the fly to the human," Elde said.


By MARY JANE SMETANKA, Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
Copyright 1997 Nando.net
Copyright 1997 Scripps Howard
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