December 2015 Science Journal

Research
Briefs
Research
in Action
NIH Grant Enables Cavener Lab to Discover Mechanisms to Improve Insulin Regulation
NSF Grant Helps to Further the Search for Earthlike Exoplanets
A typical day for Doug
Cavener, the new dean
of the Eberly College of
Science, is anything but
typical. While he spends
most of his week attending
to administration
and fundraising duties
for the college, one may
also find him sitting at
a microscope looking at fluorescent pancreatic
beta cells with one of his graduate students
or analyzing giraffe genome sequences at his
computer. That’s because in addition to his administrative
responsibilities, Cavener runs a
research lab focused on the developmental and
physiological regulatory processes that are important
in the regulation of metabolic and neurological
diseases.
Recently, the Cavener lab received a fouryear,
$1.3 million grant from the National Institutes
of Health to study insulin regulation.
Maintaining a narrow range of circulating insulin
is critical to ensuring normal blood glucose
levels and preventing the onset of diabetes
and its plethora of negative downstream effects
on human health. “The regulation of insulin
has been intensely studied since its discovery
in 1921, but the molecular and cellular mechanisms
that integrate insulin synthesis, quality
control, trafficking, and secretion are poorly understood.
The goal of our work is to understand
these mechanisms and apply them to the treatment
of diabetes,” said Cavener. Barbara Mc-
Grath, senior research associate in the Cavener
lab, added, “This new award from the NIH not
only provides us funding to keep our momentum
going, but it also signals to us that many of our
peer researchers share our enthusiasm. That is
enormously gratifying!”
Cavener and McGrath, along with postdoctoral
researchers and graduate and undergraduate
students, have been studying the function
of the protein PERK, an eIF2α kinase, since
its discovery in 2001. PERK is among a small
number of genes that is so important for pancreatic
beta cell function that its absence results
in permanent neonatal diabetes in humans and
mice. Permanent neonatal diabetes appears
within the first six months of life for humans
and persists throughout the lifespan due to the
body’s inability to make enough insulin. Studies
from the Cavener lab over the last few years
have implicated PERK as a critical coordinator
of insulin folding, quality and quantity control,
trafficking, and secretion. This newly awarded
grant from the NIH will allow Cavener’s team to
reveal the mechanisms by which this important
regulation is achieved and then apply these discoveries
to the treatment diabetes. —Carrie
Lewis
A four-year grant from
the National Science
Foundation (NSF) is allowing
scientists in the
Eberly College of Science
to better search for Earthlike
planets outside of our
solar system.
Jason Wright, associate
professor of astronomy
and astrophysics and principal investigator on
the grant, is searching for exoplanets, or planets
that exist outside of our solar system and orbit
a star instead of our sun. To do this, Wright
and his team use data from some of the largest
telescopes in the world: telescopes from the W.
M Keck Observatory in Hawaii and the Hobby-
Eberly Telescope in Texas.
The Hobby-Eberly Telescope is a joint venture
between Penn State and three other universities,
and was designed by Larry Ramsey,
distinguished senior scholar and professor of
astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State. Because
the Hobby-Eberly Telescope was built in
the late 1990s, it is getting a series of major
hardware upgrades to make it even better at
searching for exoplanets, which in turn requires
updated software to collect the telescope’s data,
says Wright. “We are working to develop new
software for the Hobby-Eberly Telescope’s highresolution
spectrograph so that it performs at a
world-class level.”
The $356,000 grant makes the high-resolution
spectrograph software upgrade possible.
The upgraded software will increase the Hobby-
Eberly Telescope’s precision and will also take
advantage of new data analysis techniques to
retroactively improve the data from the telescope’s
former spectrograph.
To discover exoplanets, Wright and his colleagues
use Doppler spectroscopy, or the wobble
method, to find Jupiter analogs, or exoplanets
that are similar in size to Jupiter in our solar
system. Jupiter analogs are large and exhibit
some gravitational pull on their star, causing
the star to “wobble.” Using the spectrograph,
Wright can measure the radial velocity and
Doppler light shifts of a star to determine if Jupiter
analogs exist in that star’s system.
“Using this method, we can determine which
stars are likely to have planets like Earth,” he
says. “We can also find the Jupiter analogs orbiting
stars already discovered to have Earthsized
planets by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.”
Searching for Jupiter analogs is an important
step in the search to find Earthlike planets. “We
can’t find things like the Earth yet, but we are
starting to find things like Jupiter, and that’s a
game of patience, because Jupiter takes twelve
years to go around the sun,” Wright says. “The
goal of the grant is to find the Jupiter analogs
as signposts for the interior planets that might
be like Earth that we can’t detect yet.” —
Whittney Gould
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