As part of a Ph.D. project to elucidate the molecular basis for a particular brain tumour, Ms Marita Vella travelled to the Diamond Light Source to investigate the structural biology of a molecular chaperone implicated in these tumours.
Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility, located at the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire and is used by over 3,000 academic and industrial researchers across a wide range of disciplines.
Ms Vella’s research took her to one of the thirty-one beamlines at Diamond where high speed electrons are used to generate electromagnetic radiation of various wavelengths, in this case X-Rays. These were used to discover the overall shape of the protein molecule in a technique utilizing small angle X-Ray scattering (SAXS).
Ms Vella also visited the laboratories of the Astbury Centre of Structural Molecular Biology, Leeds University, UK, to study protein-protein interactions implicated in the mechanism of cancer formation. To determine how tightly specific proteins binds to other protein, Ms Vella employed the powerful technique of surface plasmon resonance. Perhaps more importantly, the effect of a single amino acid change in the sequence of a protein that was discovered in Malta associated with this form of brain cancer, was also studied.
Genetic analysis has taught us much about the changes that bring about tumour formation, but it is largely relegated to detection or diagnosis. It is hoped that through the investigation of proteins at the molecular and atomic level, the basis for a disease such as cancer might be determined and better understood.
Ms Vella is carrying out her research in the laboratory of Biochemistry and Protein Science in the Department of Physiology and Biochemistry, University of Malta. Consumables have been funded through an Endeavour Scholarship and her research visit to the UK was partly funded by an International Partnership Award from MCST to Dr T. Hunter.
Prof. Gary J. Hunter and Ms Marita Vella thank their colleague Dr Chi Trinh for the opportunity and the Director of the Astbury Centre for Structural Molecular Biology, Prof. Sheena Radford FRS, for kindly allowing them to use the facilities.