When Emily Blythe attended summer research programs as an undergraduate at Grinnell College in Iowa, she quickly became enamored with the complexity between chemical principles and biological systems. Now, as a new assistant professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology, and Development, Blythe has taken her intrigue to examine how the physical and chemical make-up of a cell can contribute to its function.
“I really got interested in this idea that basic chemistry can give rise to these really intricate biological machines that comprise a cell,” says Blythe. She later decided to pursue a Ph.D. in biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology. There, she studied, essentially, how cells get rid of waste. “I was studying this protein that helps the cell degrade damaged proteins, or proteins it doesn't need anymore. Mutations in this protein cause a neurodegenerative disease called multisystem proteinopathy.”
Now, she’s broadening her scope. After conducting a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco, with a focus on understanding how cells interpret and respond to cues from their environment, Blythe hopes to more widely understand how cells organize themselves. She’s primarily interested in how a cell’s reorganization of its organelles, among other factors, can change how the cell behaves.
“A classical example of this is proteins moving [within the cell] after stimulation, and then turning on gene activity,” says Blythe. Cell receptors can interpret an environmental cue and then shuffle around proteins in the cell's ambiguous, jelly-like fluid (called the cytoplasm), which then target the cell’s DNA in its gene center, the nucleus. The activation of certain genes can change the way the cell functions, helping it carry out simple tasks to survive.
Sometimes, cell receptors can move from outside on the cell’s membrane to inside the cell. For a long time, scientists thought this was a way cells regulate their sensitivity to certain signals. But actually, says Blythe, “we’ve found that receptors inside the cell can still signal. And when they're inside, the outcomes of signaling are different.”
Blythe’s lab will continue her postdoctoral work focused on studying cell response and signaling through a family of proteins called G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs. But she’s open to a wide range of approaches and applications.
“We want to take a multidisciplinary approach,” says Blythe. She hopes to apply a range of cell biology, biochemistry, and proteomics techniques to her study of cellular proteins and their functions. “We want to take it all the way from protein interactions and how that affects a particular process in the cell, to how the cell as a whole is responding to the stimuli.” Microscopy is one aspect of her work that allows her to use imaging to visually track stimuli and cell interactions under a microscope.
The thing she looks forward to the most about working at the University of Minnesota is the College’s proximity to nature and its network of curious-minded individuals. “Everyone brings their own background, and their own ideas,” says Blythe. “I'm really excited to see how my trainees shape the direction of our research.” – Adara Taylor