2011 Student Scholarship Highlights

France, Katherine '12

Investigating the Mechanism of Action of Human Mitochondrial Alanyl-tRNA Synthetase

This project studied the larger question of how the human mitochondrial alanyl-tRNA synthetases attach the amino acid alanine to a tRNA molecule including a codon coding for alanine. This included experiments aimed at investigating the importance of the C-terminal domain in the human mitochondrial synthetase by using both human mitochondrial and E. coli examples of the alanyl-tRNA synthetase. These experiments were perfected from literature examples and used complex formation between the enzyme and substrate as a sign of successful enzyme function. The project also studied the mechanism by which two recently discovered mutations in human mitochondrial alanyl-tRNA synthetases cause fatal cardiomyopathy in infants. Through site-directed mutagenesis, the target mutations were made and their effect on the enzyme's ability to attach amino acids to their tRNA complements were tested. A larger goal of the research was to discover the mechanism of the wildtype synthetase in detail.

This work was supervised by Joe Chihade

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