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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

ric-8A in G protein, subunit biogenesis, photoreceptor cells

College

Physical and Mathematical Sciences

Department

Chemistry and Biochemistry

Abstract

  1. Grant Ludlam. The MEG award helped support Grant’s work from January 2015 through August 2016. During this time Grant has worked on three projects. He investigated the role of Ric8A in the folding of the G protein a subunit and its assembly into the G protein heterotrimeric complex. Unfortunately, his results showed that deletion of Ric8A in the photoreceptor cells of mice did not affect G protein signaling. As a result, he changed his research focus to determining the structure of the BBSome core complex. He assisted a graduate student, Takuma Aoba, in this work. They used a combination of chemical cross-linking coupled with mass spectrometry, unnatural amino acid cross-linking and electron microscopy to probe the structure. This work is now being prepared for publication and Grant will be a coauthor. He also worked with Takuma Aoba to determine the role of the chaperonin CCT and its co-chaperone phosducin-like protein in the assembly of the mTOR kinase complex. He reported this work in poster form at the Experimental Biology annual meeting in San Diego April 2016 and a paper is also being prepared for publication. Thus, Grant will be a co-author on two quality publications as a result of his undergraduate research. In August 2016, Grant joined our graduate program and is continuing his work on these project. He had also been accepted to the graduate program at Texas A&M university, but chose to remain at BYU to remain close to his fiancé who is working in Salt Lake.

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