Valerie Welborn Receives Maximizing Investigator's Research Award

Valerie Welborn, Assistant Professor of Chemistry in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, has been awarded a Maximizing Investigators' Research Award (MIRA) grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences.

The funding, in the amount of $2 million, is aimed at providing the selected investigator enhanced stability and flexibility for further discovery, thereby enhancing scientific productivity and the chances for significant breakthroughs outside the initial scope of the project.

"The proposed research aims to deepen our understanding of sugar-mediated protein-protein and protein-DNA non-enzymatic cross-link formation," Welborn said. "These cross-links have been associated with many severe pathologies, including cancer metastasis, skin and bone disorders, aging, diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cardiovascular diseases."

How fast do these cross-links form? Where do they come from? What environmental factors facilitate their formation process?  The answer is inconclusive due to limited exploration.

Non-enzymatic cross-links are largely understudied primarily due to the difficulty of characterizing the complex systems in which cross-links occur at a sufficiently high resolution. Welborn's research aims to bridge this gap by combining atomistic and microscopic simulation techniques.

"Our goal is to identify the structural and dynamical molecular factors responsible for these abnormal cross-links in biological tissues using computational methods. Our theoretical approach complements existing observations by accessing time and length scales invisible to experiments. This project will lay the foundation for advances in disease treatment and prevention."

The work in the Welborn group is aimed at understanding the operating principles of biological or biologically-inspired systems. The group derives new concepts and methodology to model these systems over a range of length and time scales, which contributes to deepening our knowledge of how they function.