We have an exciting announcement! Our own Dr. Francesca Massi and Dr. Celia Schiffer, along with Dr. Jasna Fejzo at UMass Amherst have been awarded a grant from the Massachusetts Life Science Center to purchase a brand-new NMR machine! Keep reading to find out why this is a big deal and how it will change the game for scientific research at UMass Chan.
NMR, which is short for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, is a technique scientists use to learn about the physical relationships between atoms in a molecule. Learning about where atoms are in relationship to each other in a molecule or between molecules can help scientists make discoveries that might lead to new treatments for human diseases. The new Bruker Avance Neo 800MHz NMR Spectrometer will open up novel avenues for research in the BMB, at UMass Chan & UMass Amherst, and across New England. Using this new and more powerful NMR machine, scientists will be able to answer questions they’ve never even been able to ask before about protein structure and dynamics.
To demonstrate the power of NMR, imagine trying to understand how a horse moves around in space without ever seeing one in real life. If you only looked at pictures of a horse while it was running, you might have a hard time figuring out what was going on. For example, if you were only able to see a few pictures, it might look like the horse was flying since its hooves never touched the ground in the particular set of pictures you saw.
A single image of a horse running, showing all four legs off the ground. Image source: Animal locomotion – 16 frames of racehorse “Annie G.” galloping, c. 1887; Eadweard Muybridge
Looking at more pictures would presumably fix this problem, but what if all the thousands of running horse pictures you found had been superimposed over each other into one single image? It would still be really difficult to tell what is going on with any level of helpful detail. Clearly, the horse is moving its legs around a lot, but what is really going on?
Four images of a horse running superimposed over each other. Image source: Animal locomotion – 16 frames of racehorse “Annie G.” galloping, c. 1887; Eadweard Muybridge
However, if you saw a video of a horse running, you’d be able to see exactly how its legs move to propel it forward.
An animation of a horse running, clearly showing the mechanisms of how the horse's legs propel it forward. Image source: Animal locomotion – 16 frames of racehorse “Annie G.” galloping, c. 1887; Eadweard Muybridge
In this example, NMR is the equivalent of the video camera that can capture the motions of the horse’s body as it runs. But instead of a running horse, NMR gives us information about how molecules move around in space.
With this in mind, Dr. Massi is particularly excited to use this new machinery to learn more about mechanisms driving the human disease ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis), a fatal disease with no cure that affects hundreds of thousands of people around the world. The molecule TDP-43 is one of the proteins in our cells that is known to play a role in ALS. Part of the TDP-43 protein is “intrinsically disordered”. This means that the protein itself is capable of existing comfortably in many different physical conformations (like the legs of a running horse), which makes it hard for scientists to study using other methods. NMR is the perfect tool to understand what this protein is doing, since NMR can capture information about the dynamics of molecules and how they change shape and position under different conditions. “Our goal is to understand how large and complex systems like TDP-43 exist in the cell, interact with their partners, and cause disease,” says Dr. Massi. “And now, with this new machine, we’ll be able to do this like never before.”
The potential for groundbreaking research stretches even further than studying ALS in Dr. Massi’s lab. Intrinsically disordered proteins make up approximately 1/3 of all human proteins, and many such proteins have been implicated in disease. Part of the grant that funded this new machine is also helping to expand the NMR Spectroscopy Core Facility here at UMass Chan and merge it with its sister facility at UMass Amherst, creating the Massachusetts NMR Consortium. “This machine is more powerful and can therefore be used to study more complex systems,” says Dr. Massi, which opens up the use of this technique to more scientists. “Some scientists are working with large biomolecules, and before our old NMR machine was inadequate to look at such big things. With this new instrument, we will be able to study them.”The NMR core facility will be open to internal users, as well as outside academic and industrial users. It will help advance fundamental research as well as drug discovery and it will foster collaborations between academia, biotech and pharma community. This will make it available to be used by labs all across New England. The possibility for discovery cannot be understated!
The BMB is certainly excited to see what new discoveries will come from the use of this new instrument. Stay tuned to find out! If you’re interested to learn more about Dr. Massi, check out her lab website here. Dr. Schiffer’s lab website can be found here, and Dr. Fejzo’s profile can be found here. To access this NMR machine, please contact the NMR core facility at UMass Chan.
