KAIST 생명과학과동창회
  • News & Events
  • News

News

Growing up curious in the countryside leads to tools for manipulating endogenous proteins.

 

 

허원도 교수님 사진.jpg



Won Do Heo

“Good ideas come to me when I am very comfortable, when I am very happy,” says Won Do Heo, who is on the biology faculty at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), and is a neuroscience fellow at the Institute for Basic Science, both in Daejon, Republic of Korea. An idea might come to him in a lab conversation, at a seminar or conference, when he is jogging, on one of his daily walks on a hill, or in the sauna at home.

 

It was a Korean national holiday and Heo was alone in the lab, thinking. He had spent a decade developing and using optogenetic tools. Suddenly, he realized how he might finally turn intrabodies, which are antibodies used to study intracellular proteins, into inducible tools.

 

Heo and his lab converted the idea into two classes of tools to target and manipulate proteins inside cells: optobodies, which can be activated by light; and chemobodies, which can be activated by small molecules. These tools leverage nanobodies, based on camelid antibodies, that are prized in cell biology for being soluble and small they’re around half the size of a green fluorescent protein molecule.

 

During that holiday musing, Heo had figured out at which cysteine residues he could split the nanobody to generate two inactive parts that do not bind a targeted protein. He checked the nanobody structure, and experiments got underway. The split structure lets an experimenter use light to, for example, activate or inhibit a protein at the cell membrane, at an organelle or in the cell nucleus. When the nanobody halves are separate, it’s like having only one chopstick for a meal, he says. Work only gets done when the other half enters the scene.

 

The tools offer high-resolution temporal and spatial information about endogenous proteins, says Heo. With optobodies, light can help with manipulating a targeted protein and thus shape cell function. The team’s chemobody would be good for an in vivo experiment, he says. Such studies, for example in neurobiology, are on his to-do list.

 

The lab used blue light to activate the optobody, but Heo believes he can get the tools to work with infrared light, too. Although there are many types of nanobodies, he believes the tools will work across this antibody class and for many types of questions. The chosen split site is in the antibody’s highly conserved domain.

 

In his lab, says Heo, tool development involves intense testing, which takes a collaborative lab culture. Lab members not involved in a project are a tool’s first users. This arrangement is not easy given his students’ eagerness to publish quickly. But Heo seeks generalizable, broadly applicable tools. “I don’t make very special, very tricky things,” he says, which might only work in a few labs.

 

In his lab, Heo encourages his students to explore projects that intrigue them and that will make them happy during their years in his lab. “If they are not happy with something, I won’t be happy, too.”

 

Heo grew up on a farm in the country. “I didn’t really have the plan to be a professorresearcher at the time,” he says. He played with his dog, rabbit and cows, and was curious about how they interacted and cared for their young. He learned about rice and barley farming. “It’s not textbook, it’s just nature,” he says. In high school, he began breeding birds: peacocks, turkeys, pheasants, parrots and canaries.

 

Even college was not in his plans, but curiosity led him to Gyeongsang National University. “I realized that I had to step up to another level,” he says. Heo studied plant biology and switched to biochemistry in graduate school.

 

For his postdoctoral fellowship, curiosity was again a driver. He wanted to work in mammalian systems, and joined the Duke University lab of Tobias Meyer. Heo followed Meyer to Stanford University where, after a few years, he was promoted to staff researcher. After nine years in California, Heo joined KAIST and chose to focus on optogenetics.

 

Heo feels he can now combine his experience across fields: plant biology, cell biology, cell signaling and neurobiology. As Heo completed his PhD, he remembers realizing that many plant proteins are not present in mammals, which might make them useful tools, he says. This idea has emerged as a cornerstone of optogenetics.

 

Optogenetics has taken cell biology labs beyond observation, which might miss half of the actual cellular events. Cells “are talking to each other, communicating to each other,” he says. The ability to activate or deactivate proteins with light gives labs a way to explore cell biology more deeply and can help them, for example, determine proteins crucial to the cell cycle.

 

“If they are not happy with something, I won’t be happy.”

 

“I admire Won Do’s work for its creativity; he has applied optical control by the cryptochromeCIB1 interaction in very imaginative ways,” says Heo’s friend and colleague, Stanford University researcher Michael Lin. Heo and his students don’t shy away from the hard work necessary to realize their ideas, says Lin. “Developing truly new methods is high-risk and time-consuming, but Won Do has shown that the high rewards make it worth it.”



출처: Nature Methods > This month >

       https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-019-0626-1


List of Articles
번호 제목 글쓴이 날짜 조회 수
390 [한국경제] 고규영 교수 유력 바이오논문 6편 최다 발표 과사무실 2005.09.02 11926
389 [한겨레] 생체시계 시간 맞추는 유전자 국내 연구팀이 첫 발견-김재섭 교수팀 과사무실 2005.10.20 10970
388 과사무실 최은주 사무원 - 2005년도 4/4분기 "이 달의 직원상" 수상 과사무실 2005.11.01 10672
387 1단계 BK21사업 성과보고대회 - 우수사업단 선정 및 부총리 표창 과사무실 2005.12.19 11253
386 한국, 신종 박테리아 발표건수 68종 세계 1위 - 이성택 교수 세계 2위 과사무실 2005.12.19 13566
385 2005학년도 석림학술장학재단 장학생 - 이영석 박사과정 학생 선정 과사무실 2005.12.29 12229
384 ‘올해의 KAIST 교수상’ - 김재섭 교수 과사무실 2005.12.30 13546
383 "어, 해독제가 항생제로 바뀌네" - 김학성 교수팀 단백질 설계기술 개발 과사무실 2006.02.06 13731
382 개교 35주년 기념 우수교원 포상 - 김태국 교수(학술상), 김학성 교수(국제협력상) 과사무실 2006.02.15 11960
381 고병삼 학생 외 3명 Bioneer Award (2006) 수상 과사무실 2006.03.07 14119
380 "당뇨병 합병증 치료단백질 개발!" - 고규영교수팀 과사무실 2006.03.14 13846
379 [동아일보] 뇌 신호전달 작동물질 첫 발견-김은준교수팀 과사무실 2006.04.20 12022
378 [동아일보] 한국 과학에 세계가 또 놀라다 -정종경교수팀 과사무실 2006.05.04 14541
377 [대덕넷] 노화억제 비밀 밝혀낸 김태국 교수...연구성과 집대성 '풀베팅' 과사무실 2006.06.12 14175
376 [동아일보] 노화억제 신약후보물질 개발…김태국 교수팀 과사무실 2006.06.12 11314
375 [중앙일보] 생명과학과 박지혜 '로레알 여성생명과학상' 수상 과사무실 2006.06.22 13457
374 [동아일보] 혈관형성 촉진제 이용 만성 신장질환 고쳐요-고규영교수 과사무실 2006.08.03 11574
373 박태관 교수 나노연구혁신 대상(과학기술부 장관상) 수상 과사무실 2006.09.04 10781
372 송세라, 박영균 학생 김보정 기초과학장학생으로 선발 과사무실 2006.09.12 13215
371 [경향신문] 뇌에서 시냅스 생성촉진 새 단백질 발견 -김은준교수팀 과사무실 2006.09.18 13345
Board Pagination Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ... 22 Next
/ 22