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----------------------------------------------------------------------- Can of worms may be key for top notch university ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 <http://www.nando.net/newsroom/ntn/health/112297/health8_10086_noframes.html> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- janet [log in to unmask]