Susan Lindquist wins HHMI appointment
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (May 16, 2006) — Whitehead Member
Susan
Lindquist has been appointed an Investigator of
the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). Lindquist
will remain at Whitehead Institute while HHMI employs
her and funds a large percentage of her research.
“HHMI allows scientists to undertake high-risk,
high-payoff research without worrying about short-term
deliverables and grant cycles,” says Lindquist.
“I can now move forward with what I hope will
be visionary projects.”
Most public funding for science is earmarked for specific
projects. HHMI, on the other hand, supports specific
people. HHMI identifies smart, creative scientists with
proven track records and gives them money with virtually
no strings attached. These investigators can pursue
projects deemed risky by traditional funding sources
and change course as they follow their scientific instincts.
“Sue Lindquist's reappointment to HHMI
is a testament to the sustained excellence and
creativity of her work,” says Whitehead
Director David Page, who is also an HHMI Investigator.
“Sue and her lab add to the excitement and
buzz that define Whitehead science.” |
Before coming to Whitehead and serving as Director from
2001 to 2004, Lindquist was an HHMI Investigator for
13 years at the University of Chicago, where she studied
protein folding. HHMI funding allowed her to conduct
several high-risk studies, including one that demonstrated
a role of protein folding in the process of evolution.
“The postdoctoral fellowship that was written
for that work was turned down everywhere,” she
says. “I was able to support the project with
Hughes’ money.”
Lindquist and her colleagues uncovered the first major
mechanism by which organisms can acquire complex traits
rapidly. They discovered that a protein called Hsp90—which
promotes the folding of a special group of proteins
called signal transducers—plays a major role in
this process.
Signal transducers are key regulators of cell growth
and developmental fates. When organisms are exposed
to stress, Hsp90 expression increases, but often not
enough to fully maintain all signal transduction pathways.
This means that small changes in members of these pathways
that have been accumulating in the genome can suddenly
exert strong effects. Most are detrimental, but when
they are beneficial, selective breeding can enrich the
genetic changes, creating organisms with new traits.
While some researchers in Lindquist’s lab still
study this mechanism, most are working on other aspects
of protein folding, conducting experiments in fields
ranging from nanotechnology to neurological diseases
such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Her
lab, for example, reproduced many of the biological
consequences of Parkinson’s disease in yeast cells,
work that enabled other researchers to begin screening
potential therapeutic drugs.
Lindquist is also well known for her studies on prion
proteins, such as the one responsible for the human
equivalent of mad cow disease. The “misfolded”
version of the protein PrP causes other proteins to
assume its aberrant form, a chain reaction that wreaks
havoc in cells. Lindquist’s group established
that the same type of chain reaction can have beneficial
effects with different proteins.
“Sue Lindquist's work on prions is imaginative
and original,” says Whitehead Member and HHMI
Medical Advisory Board Member Gerald Fink. “She
is just the sort of scientist that HHMI prides itself
in supporting.”
"Sue Lindquist's reappointment to HHMI is a testament
to the sustained excellence and creativity of her work,"
says Director David Page, who is also an HHMI Investigator.
"Sue and her lab add to the excitement and buzz
that define Whitehead science."
Whitehead Member David Bartel also holds an HHMI appointment,
and 25 of the roughly 320 HHMI investigators in the
nation have worked at Whitehead at some point in their
careers.
“I’m excited to be part of the Hughes community
again,” says Lindquist. “I’m looking
forward to the cross-fertilization of ideas among Investigators.”
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