UAlbany Biology Professor Wins Sloan Foundation Award
By Greta Petry

Ing-Nang Wang/Photo by Mark Schmidt

Assistant Professor of Biology Ing-Nang Wang is among the outstanding young scientists and economists who have been chosen to receive the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation research fellowship.

The winners were selected from among hundreds of highly qualified scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis of their exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge. Twenty-eight former Sloan fellows have received Nobel prizes, and hundreds have received other prestigious awards and honors.

David Shub, professor and former chair of the Department of Biological Sciences, said: “Our department was lucky to attract Dr. Wang in last year’s faculty search for a molecular evolutionary population biologist. He is remarkably interactive and intellectually stimulating, and we feel he will play a major role in integrating molecular biology with evolutionary biology for our students. When we discovered that the Sloan Foundation included a new fellowship category this year in Computational and Evolutionary Molecular Biology, Dr. Caro-Beth Stewart (who chaired the search committee) and I decided that Dr. Wang would be an exceptionally strong candidate. In addition to a strong record of achievement, fellows are expected to have displayed exceptional creativity and independent thought at this early career stage, attributes that Dr. Wang clearly possesses. We are proud, but not surprised, that he was selected.”

The Sloan Foundation awards began in 1955 as a means of encouraging research by young scholars at a critical time in their careers when other support is difficult to obtain. Grants of $40,000 for a two-year period are administered by each fellow’s institution. Once chosen, fellows are free to pursue whatever lines of inquiry are of most interest to them. This flexibility is often of great value to young scientists who are at a pivotal stage in establishing their own independent research projects.

Wang was the only winner from a SUNY school. Other schools represented were Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, University of California at Berkeley, Irvine and Los Angeles, and the University of Chicago. There were 117 winners who are faculty members at 50 colleges and universities across the nation.

Wang is a molecular biologist who is looking for a home near the University at Albany, so that if he awakens in the middle of the night with a sudden insight, he can stop by the lab to test that idea.

His research has taken two directions. The first is purely academic. “It involves the use of bacteriophage, viruses that infect bacteria, as a model system to study various issues of the evolution of life history traits. The long-term goal is to integrate the molecular details of a system into an ecological and evolutionary perspective,” said Wang, who moved to the U.S. from Taiwan 15 years ago.

The second project involves the isolation of various lysis proteins from small bacteriophages, with the hope that these lysis proteins can be used as an alternative source for antibiotic drug design. Lysis is the process by which a cell destructs through the action of specific lysins.

Wang’s interest in bacteriophage lysis began at Texas A&M University, where he conducted postdoctoral research under the tutelage of Dr. Ryland E. Young in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

“In a simple environment that we create in the laboratory, using the model system bacteriophage, can we predict its evolutionary direction? We use the evolutionary biology framework to integrate it into the grand scheme of molecular mechanisms to show how much we understand about the system. You can predict future behavior and subject the virus to experiments,” Wang said. “These are the reasons why I chose bacteriophage as my study organism. Bacteriophage is a very simple organism, and is very easy to maintain and manipulate in a simple laboratory environment. There is also a wealth of molecular information on bacteriophages, making them one of the most studied organisms on earth. These two features, easy to work with and a lot of information on them, make the bacteriophage an excellent model system to study ecological and evolutionary questions. What I hope to accomplish is to integrate what we currently know about bacteriophages, their molecular biology, so to speak, into the evolutionary biology framework.”

Regarding his second project, the molecular biologist explained there are two ways in general for bacteriophages to lyse their bacterial hosts. “For large bacteriophages, a protein, called holin, is produced at the late stage of an infection. The function of the holin is to disrupt the integrity of the bacterial cell membrane. Through the membrane lesion created by the holin, a second bacteriophage protein, called endolysin, can get access to its target, the bacterial cell wall. By digesting away the cell wall with endolysin, a large bacteriophage can finally achieve its real purpose: lysing its host to release the accumulated bacteriophage progeny to the environment so that these progeny can start their own infection cycle again. However, for small bacteriophages, they generally do not have this “holin-endolysin” strategy to lyse their hosts. How do they lyse their hosts to release their progeny? We found out that the strategy adopted by these small bacteriophages is very interesting, and potentially very important, as well. What we found out is that at the late stage of infection, the small bacteriophages produce a lysis protein which functions to inhibit the bacterial enzymes involved in cell wall synthesis. By disrupting the pathway leading to bacterial cell wall synthesis, these small bacteriophages achieve bacteria lysis, behaving like antibiotics, such as penicillin,” Wang said.

“Look at today’s antibiotics that target cell wall synthesis,” he said. For example, in E.coli, there are a dozen steps inside the cell that lead to cell wall synthesis. These steps are pretty conserved throughout all bacteria. However, looking at antibiotics that are available today, first, there are only a few steps being targeted by these antibiotics, and second, many of the antibiotics target the same steps. But from various laboratory studies, it has been shown that if you disrupt any of the dozen steps, you can kill the bacteria. The interesting question is: Have these small bacteriophages “learned” to target other steps? This is not just academically interesting, but also has practical applications. We can potentially use these lysis proteins as alternative sources for antibiotic drug design.

Even though these lysis proteins can potentially be used for drug design, a lot of work still needs to be done to realize the potential, Wang cautioned. “The biggest obstacle is to convert these large lysis proteins into small peptides so that bacteria can take them up inside the cell. We still don’t know if that’s possible. The unexpected discovery of the function of lysis proteins from small bacteriophages is another example of why basic research, though seemingly unrelated to everyday life, can potentially make important contributions to human welfare.”

A member of the UAlbany biology department since September of 2002, Wang earned his Ph.D. in ecology and evolution from SUNY Stony Brook in 1998; a master’s in plant virology from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1990; and a bachelor’s degree in plant pathology and entomology from National Taiwan University in 1985. This spring he is co-teaching Evolution for undergraduate biology majors with Jason Cryan of the New York State Museum. Next semester he will be co-teaching, with Timothy Gage, Human Population Genetics, a requirement for forensic scientists.

Albany Third in Nation as Educational Hub
The Albany region is tops when it comes to education, according to a February 14 article in Forbes magazine that was based on research done by the Places Rated Almanac, Millennium Edition. The Albany-Schenectady-Troy region rated No. 3, after the Raleigh-Durham Chapel Hill area and Boston, Mass.

The article, “The Best Places with the Best Education,” noted that property values increase in proportion to state aid spending per pupil, and that parents are willing to pay top dollar to live in school districts in which there is a good mix of high-quality public and private schools.

The almanac rated 354 regions by indicators, including the crime rate, education, the cost of living, and climate.

“Most of the education hubs also have established institutions that offer long-term value to the community,” noted the Forbes article by Betsy Schiffman. “For example, the State University of New York at Albany was created in 1844, and has about 17,000 students enrolled in nine colleges and schools. Not only does the University provide a fertile environment that encourages learning, it is also a major employer that - unlike many now-defunct tech companies - is unlikely to endure massive layoffs.”

David Savageau, editor of the Places Rated Almanac, was quoted in Forbes as saying: “You don’t see a lot of colleges folding overnight, and you don’t see colleges being added at a tremendous rate. The quality of schools is an important consideration behind mobility, and the better the education, the pricier the home.”

MindGenix Helps Drug Firms in Alzheimer’s Research
The economic engines continue to rev up at the University at Albany’s East Campus. Since last summer, MindGenix Inc. (USA), a small startup company, has been operating at the campus’s business incubator for biotechnology.

MindGenix, managed by David Pushett, chief operating officer, offers contract research services to firms that develop pharmaceuticals to combat neurological ailments, especially the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.

According to Pushett, the firm is involved in roughly 10 projects for clients. With revenues in the first half of 2003 expected to double or triple the firm’s earnings from the last six months of 2002, the business appears to be taking off.

One of the things MindGenix has to offer is high-quality laboratory mice, according to Pushett. With exclusive rights to mice that develop Alzheimer’s disease in three months (six months faster than normal), MindGenix has a product that is in growing demand by researchers. The firm’s supplier of lab mice is Taconic Biotechnology, one of the larger tenants at UAlbany’s East Campus.

A Jerusalem-based firm named Mindset BioPharmaceuticals, which is researching therapies for Alzheimer’s and other neurological diseases, is among MindGenix’s main customers. It is also the company that spun off the start-up firm. MindGenix was launched as an independent firm after Mindset spotted a market niche for a type of research that was previously done in-house.

Profitable from the start, MindGenix has branched out to provide services to Mindset’s competition, as well. According to the New York Biotechnology Association of Stony Brook, N.Y., there is a continuing demand for contract research on Alzheimer’s, with much research funding available.

Proximity to Taconic Biotechnology was a main reason for MindGenix’s decision to locate at the East Campus. The firm occupies roughly 2,000-square feet of lab space, which it may soon outgrow. In the next year to year and a half, Pushett expects the firm of two full-time employees to grow to five to 10 scientists and about five support personnel. In addition to the two employees, the firm also pays the cost of several researchers who are under subcontract.

Eugene Schuler, UAlbany’s associate vice president for research and director of technology development, said MindGenix and Taconic Biotechnology are good examples of how UAlbany’s co-location model - creating synergy through strategically locating scientists and businesses side by side - is contributing to the success of the East Campus.