The Role of Small Molecules in Biology
We collaborate with Prof. Jonathan Arnold and others to try to understand the circadian oscillation of the filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa. This model organism has a clock that cycles about every 24 hours, and our lab is trying to understand the chemical control of that behavior. N. crassa is also a famous model organism because of the Nobel Prize research by Beadle and Tatum. In that work, Beadle and Tatum discovered a way to link metabolism with genetics, which has been credited as the start of We collaborate with Prof. Jonathan Arnold and others to try to understand the circadian oscillation of the filamentous fungus, Neurospora crassa. This model organism has a clock that cycles about every 24 hours, and our lab is trying to understand the chemical control of that behavior. N. crassa is also a famous model organism because of the Nobel Prize research by Beadle and Tatum. In that work, Beadle and Tatum discovered a way to link metabolism with genetics, which has been credited as the start of molecular biology. Our research into the clock of N. crassa brought us to a new method that we have develped called Continous in vivo Metabolism by NMR (CIVM-NMR). Using CIVM-NMR, we can extract detailed information on the changes in metabolites as the orgamism grows. We can study different genetic strains of N. crassa and different sources of nutrients or oxygenation levels.