Features
‘We Go Where the Molecules Take Us'
Guelph grad follows path back to U of G to study inner workings of cells in kidney disease, cancer
BY ANDREW VOWLES
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| Prof. Nina Jones runs a busy lab searching for the molecular roots of afflictions such as cancer and kidney disease. Photo by Martin Schwalbe |
The thrill of asking questions and finding answers is what drives Prof. Nina Jones, Molecular and Cellular Biology. It's what propels her into her science complex research lab every day to study the underpinnings of kidney disease, cancer and other afflictions. It's also what keeps her looking for promising students — especially undergraduates — to share that thrill with another generation of scientists.
Jones studies the molecular mechanisms that develop and maintain the heart and blood vessels. Her work may also help in understanding what goes wrong with those processes to cause such ailments as heart defects, kidney disease and cancer.
Why blood vessels? Why not, she counters. They're responsible for supplying nutrients and oxygen to the entire body and helping to remove wastes. The cardiovascular system is the first to form in the embryo, she says, pointing under a microscope to the minuscule heart of a 10-day-old mouse embryo no bigger than a thumbtack.
Since returning to her alma mater in 2006, Jones has looked at proteins that serve as chemical messengers to help build and maintain blood vessels.
Early this month, she learned she will receive $520,000 over the next five years from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Last fall, she was awarded more than $300,000 in infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, including provincial and University contributions.
In 2007, she received an Early Researcher Award from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, as well as funding from the Kidney Foundation of Canada (KFC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).
About two million Canadians have kidney disease or are at risk, according to KFC statistics. And that number is increasing as obesity rates rise, says Jones. Diabetes causes about one-third of kidney failure cases in new patients.
She is the first and only Guelph researcher funded by the KFC, says Wim Wolfs, director of national research programs with the foundation in Montreal.
In the kidney, special cells called podocytes develop around blood vessels. Their long finger-like projections enable the kidney to filter 180 litres of blood a day.
Jones is interested in how blood vessels grow in the developing embryo and how they work to help the kidney filter wastes. Elsewhere, how do blood vessels find themselves co-opted to grow toward a cancer tumour, nourishing it and enabling it to enlarge?
Knowing more about chemical signalling involving various proteins might ultimately help in developing new drugs and novel therapies to counter diseases, although the Guelph professor cautions that any treatments based on her work are a long way off.
She uses knockout mice, rodents manipulated genetically to help pinpoint the precise effects of single gene mutations. Disabling genes — and the proteins they make — may affect the growth of blood vessels in the developing embryo, allowing Jones to look at the molecular roots of various diseases.
She works closely with the Toronto Centre for Phenogenomics (TCP), a repository of mice strains specially bred to develop particular afflictions. Observing mice with precisely mutated genes allows scientists to make inferences about the causes and treatment of disease involving the comparable bit of DNA in humans.
“That's a huge resource,” she says, adding that U of G lacks a transgenic facility of its own. “We send them DNA, and they send us mice.”
Jones worked with several TCP scientists as a post-doc at the Samuel Lunenfeld Research Institute in Toronto. She had studied angiogenesis, or blood vessel formation, during her PhD at the University of Toronto. Originally from Kincardine, she earned her B.Sc. in molecular biology and genetics here at Guelph. She remembers being fascinated by a course in genetics taught by former professor Alan Wildeman.
“That was a turning point,” she says, recalling the excitement in the early '90s about taking advantage of a revolution in ideas and information about genetics.
That fascination still drives her to learn more about how the body is put together and how its elements interact, particularly how protein signals cause things to change, grow and move.
She hadn't set out to cure disease. Her path began, as with many basic researchers, under the microscope.
“We go where the molecules take us,” she says, referring to five graduate students and three undergraduates in her lab. “So much of science is where you land. You don't always have a defined path.”
That's a lesson she imparts to those students.
PhD candidate Laura New studies what happens when signalling pathways break down between those kidney podocytes.
“By studying how these pathways are regulated, we will be better equipped to understand the mechanisms behind the early stages of kidney disease and perhaps lead to a better method of diagnosis,” says New, who completed a B.Sc. in biological chemistry at Guelph and who received an NSERC Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship last year.
Melanie Wills, a President's Scholar and Canada Millennium Scholar, is completing her B.Sc. in molecular biology and genetics and plans to begin graduate work with Jones in the spring. Using funding from an Ontario Genomics Institute Fellowship, she has already worked in her professor's lab on a signalling molecule in the brain that Jones found during her post-doc.
“Cancer can occur when various communication pathways in the cell operate at the wrong time or place,” says Wills. “Understanding the molecular signalling components of these pathways and how they behave under normal and cancerous conditions gives us a better picture of how cells communicate messages and how the normal process can go awry in disease.”
That work is complemented by research on mouse models by M.Sc. student Steve Hawley. He says his work may help in learning about cancer and developmental heart defects. A co-op work term in Jones's lab last year as an undergraduate earned him U of G's 2008 Co-op Student of the Year award in science and engineering.
Jones taught developmental biology last year and will teach human genetics next year. During her first year as a faculty member, she mentored a trio of high school students working on a science fair project in her lab. “It's important for students to see how research is done,” she says.
Referring to the lack of new funding for Canada's main granting councils in last month's federal budget, she says: “If they don't fund university research, I don't know how we'll capture the interest of the next generation.”