D. Allan Drummond, PhD, has received a $2.5-million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study cellular functions in response to stresses like increased heat and oxidation. The grant is a Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA/R35) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), a division of the NIH that supports fundamental science that increases the understanding of biological processes.
Drummond is an Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology who studies how cells respond to stresses like heat shock at the molecular level. His lab focuses on large clusters of proteins and RNA that form and dissolve during and after stress, using a wide range of techniques, including in vivo imaging, in vitro reconstitution and mechanistic biochemistry, quantitative proteomics, and molecular evolutionary analyses.
These groups of proteins and RNA were long thought to be toxic or waste, but Drummond and his team will be pursuing a new line of research suggesting that they serve an adaptive function to help organisms respond to stressors. They will identify and dissect the cellular functions of particular heat-shock or stress-induced condensates of proteins and mRNA, study the regulation of the condensation and dispersal process, and dig deeper into the conversion of temperature into adaptive responses in fungi that rely on warm-blooded hosts and in the vertebrate immune system during fever.
“Success for us would be new molecular insights into how cells sense and respond to changes in their environment—insights that, if we’re doing our job right, will shape how others develop new therapies and molecular engineering approaches,” Drummond said. “We’re grateful for the vote of confidence in this kind of deep inquiry.”
