We are pleased to announce that we have two joint winners of the award for the 2007 JCS prize. One of them is Adi Dubash, who receives the prize for his paper entitled `A novel role for Lsc/p115 RhoGEF and LARG in regulating RhoA activity downstream of adhesion to fibronectin' (Dubash et al., 2007). The other is Masamitsu Sone, who published the article `The mRNA-like noncoding RNA Gomafu constitutes a novel nuclear domain in a subset of neurons' (Sone et al., 2007).
The prize, $1000, is awarded annually to the first author of the paper that is judged by the Editors and Editorial Board to be the best published in the Journal that year. To be considered for the prize, the first author must be a student or a postdoc of no more than five years standing.FIG1
Adi Dubash grew up in Bombay, India. When 17 years old, he moved to Austin to attend the University of Texas, where he majored in Cell and Molecular Biology. He had always loved Biology, but his interest in research developed through participation in UT's Science Undergraduate Research Group (SURGe). In his sophomore year he joined Surangani Dharmawardhane's laboratory in the Molecular Cell and Developmental Biology Department, whose research focuses on the role of Rho GTPases in breast cancer. Adi feels greatly indebted to Su and her talented post-doc Delia Brownson for their guidance and encouragement during those first years of research. The two of them gave him his start in science, making it exciting, addictive and fun.
Adi applied to the Department of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of North Carolina for graduate school. He had a particular interest in the research conducted in Keith Burridge's laboratory, and was very excited when he was able to join the lab in 2004. Matrix adhesion and Rho GTPase signalling is a major focus of the Burridge lab, especially the mechanisms which control activation of the Rho proteins themselves. There are many more regulatory proteins (GEFs and GAPs) than GTPases, and a major question in the field is which specific GEFs/GAPs regulate GTPase activation downstream of different extracellular signals. Previous work from the Burridge lab had identified the Src-p190RhoGAP pathway leading to the transient inhibition of RhoA activity when cells are plated onto fibronectin (Arthur et al., 2000). When Adi joined Keith's laboratory, Bill Arthur and Krister Wennerberg were investigating which GEFs are responsible for the subsequent activation phase of RhoA on fibronectin. Using a method for isolating active exchange factors (pioneered in the Burridge lab) combined with an unbiased proteomics approach, Krister identified Lsc/p115 RhoGEF as a potential exchange factor activated by fibronectin adhesion. This initial discovery formed the basis of Adi's subsequent work on Lsc/p115 RhoGEF and LARG, implicating both of these GEFs as being responsible for controlling RhoA activation downstream of adhesion to fibronectin, and resulting in the recent paper published in Journal of Cell Science (Dubash et al., 2007).
Adi's future work will focus on the mechanism(s) through which these GEFs are activated by fibronectin adhesion. Understanding how specific GEFs/GAPs regulate Rho-protein function will fill important gaps in our knowledge about different Rho GTPase signalling pathways. After completing his PhD dissertation (hopefully by the end of 2008), Adi plans on a career in academia and is actively looking for a post-doc position in a cell biology lab.FIG2
Masamitsu Sone was born in Osaka and raised in Wakayama, Japan. In high school he was stimulated by some science fiction novels written by Carl Sagan and Michael Crichton, and was interested in becoming a scientist. At the age of 18 he joined the Faculty of Science of Kyoto University as an undergraduate. At that time he was also interested in physics and chemistry, but his interest became focused on developmental biology after he attended a lecture on organogenesis from the evolutionary point of view. In the fourth year of his undergraduate studies, he joined the laboratory of Masatoshi Takeichi at the RIKEN Center for Developmental Biology (CDB) in Kobe. There, under the supervision of Shinichi Nakagawa, he began a project to identify those genes that regulate layer specificity in the mouse retina. In this ambitious research project he initially used a single-cell PCR technique developed in the laboratory of Kiyokazu Agata at the CDB to identify cell-type-specific genes. He identified several genes specifically expressed in ganglion cells or cone cells. But, unfortunately, he could not find the genes related to retinal-layer formation. In the first year of his PhD, he moved to the RIKEN Wako campus in Saitama where Shinichi started to run his own research group. This became a good opportunity for Masamitsu to refresh his mind and shift his research focus from retinal development to the characterization of a non-coding RNA – one of the ganglion-cell-specific genes he had identified previously. This RNA attracted him by its curious localization; it appeared like hundreds of little stars in the nuclei when detected by fluorescent in situ hybridization! This gene was named gomafu after the Japanese word meaning spotted pattern. The nuclear localization of gomafu RNA was interesting because it had the structure of a mature mRNA, which is ordinarily exported to the cytoplasm. Masamitsu revealed that gomafu RNA constitutes a novel nuclear domain and is a cell-type specific component of the nuclear matrix, where proteins regulate a wide variety of nuclear functions, including transcription, DNA repair and RNA splicing. These observations stimulated his concept of the function of gomafu as a structural non-coding RNA.
At present, Masamitsu is trying to reveal the function of gomafu RNA by using knockout mice, and to approach the question of why this RNA escapes nuclear export. Thus, the study of this enigmatic non-coding RNA has entered its next stage. Masamitsu has recently submitted his PhD thesis on the subject of gomafu RNA to the Graduate School of Biostudies at Kyoto University, and is planning to find a post-doctoral position in Europe after finishing work in Shinichi's lab to write another research paper about gomafu RNA.
