UW News

July 24, 2003

Keck names UW researcher ‘Distinguished Young Scholar’

News and Information

Daniel Chiu does research at the tiniest scales, but he hopes he can help unlock some of medical science’s biggest puzzles.

Last week Chiu, an assistant chemistry professor, was named one of five recipients nationwide of $1 million research grants from the W.M. Keck Foundation’s Distinguished Young Scholars in Medical Research Program. The five-year award will support his work trying to decipher how the function of nerve synapses mimics that of a computer in the processes of learning and memory. The work could lead to greater understanding of, and thus possibly a treatment for, neurological disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases.

“The synapse, based on our current understanding, is where learning and memory happens,” he said.

Another of the awards from the Los Angeles-based Keck Foundation goes to Adrian Ferré-D’Amaré, an investigator in the Basic Sciences Division at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a UW affiliate assistant professor in biochemistry. Ferré-D’Amaré has used X-ray crystallography to decipher the three-dimensional structures of ribozymes, intricately folded RNA molecules that carry out enzymatic reactions. With the Keck award, he will apply his understanding of RNA to the design of experimentally modified RNA and other molecules that interact with RNA. Such molecules could potentially be used to treat a variety of diseases, including some cancers and blood disorders.

The Chiu research group uses lasers to remove synaptic vesicles from neurons, the working cells of nerves, and analyze how they function in synaptic transmission, learning and memory. Vesicles are minuscule pouches of liquid where chemical reactions take place that transfer information along a nerve’s path. Vesicles — essential in the chemical transfer of tiny information packets from one neuron to another — are just 50 nanometers across, about one-two-thousandth the width of a human hair.

The research primarily works with rat brains and cultures of brain cells. Chiu describes the work as basic research, looking at the individual makeup of vesicles one at a time, trying to find out more about what chemicals are being released during various nerve functions, and how it changes over time and with activity.

“Once we understand the molecular details, then that will shed a lot of light on various neurological functions and dysfunctions,” he said.

Beyond doing cellular nanosurgery at such small scales, the Chiu group actually is doing chemistry at the same level, in amounts of solution as small as one quadrillionth of a liter, called a femtoliter.

“We try to do chemistry at such a small scale because unless we can do that, we won’t be able to do what we want to do with the synaptic vesicles,” Chiu said. “That’s a very tiny amount of volume. That makes it challenging.”