POTSDAM -- Fadi Bou-Abdallah, an associate professor in the Department of Chemistry at SUNY Potsdam, received a grant award from the National Institutes of Health for $325,764.
The NIH Academic Research Enhancement Award grant will fund Bou-Abdallah's project, "Heteropolymer Ferritins Structure-Function Studies." Through this research, he will seek to understand how iron, an essential trace element required for most living organisms, is taken up and released by the major iron storage protein, ferritin.
The professor will also examine how certain mutations in this protein at the molecular level lead to debilitating iron-related diseases.
"This NIH award will have a dramatic impact on undergraduate research here at SUNY Potsdam, and offers students a meaningful research experience that will prepare them for graduate work in the health-related sciences (seeking Ph.D. or MD degrees)," said Bou-Abdallah.
"I am very pleased that the reviewers who handled my grant application at the National Institutes of Health were convinced that the questions being addressed are important for improving human health, and that my laboratory is well positioned and well equipped to provide answers to these questions."
The human body requires a number of trace elements to function properly. One of those trace elements is iron, which is essential for not only humans but also most forms of life, including algae, bacteria, plants and animals. Too much or too little iron can create problems that are significant contributors to human diseases. Fortunately, the human body has machinery that maintains appropriate amounts of iron. One of the most important proteins that helps maintain an iron balance in the body is ferritin, the iron storage protein.
The question of how ferritin stores and releases iron has been extensively studied in literature. Surprisingly, most of these studies employed proteins that do not mimic the real ferritin present in cells, Bou-Abdallah said.
This research grant proposal uses ferritin proteins that are similar to those found in various tissues and organs, with the goal of understanding this complex mechanism and defining at the molecular levels how ferritin manages to take up and releases iron in a controlled manner to avoid iron debilitating diseases caused by free iron in the body.
This fundamental understanding of a crucial biological process has clinical and practical implications that will allow the design and development of new treatments for iron overload diseases and other defects in iron metabolism.
Bou-Abdallah plans to work alongside four or five undergraduates each semester, and three students over the summer, to complete the project. The students will offer posters or talks at conferences, such as the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, as well as the Gordon Conferences and Sigma Xi Honor Society meetings.
