Rob Bellin

College of Saint Benedict/Saint John's University Alums

Class of 1994 Saint John's University Alumni

Graduate student at Iowa State University

Rob writes:

I've just finished my second year of graduate study in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, with a Biochemistry major, at Iowa State University. I am working in the Muscle Biology Group in Dr. Richard Robson's lab. We work on biochemical structure and function of muscle and muscle proteins. My project involves a group of structural proteins known as intermediate filament (IF) proteins. We believe that these proteins associate to form homo- and hetero-filaments of 10nm is diameter which act to hold neighboring myofibrils in register during muscle contraction. The majority of my work centers around understanding the IF protein synemin, which I identified as a IF protein by cloning and sequencing in January of 1995 and reported at the American Society for Cell Biology meeting, in December of 1995, in Washington D.C. These results were also published in a small research communication paper in Biochemical Biophysical Research Communications.

I now am completing the sequence of this large (230 kDa) protein, as well as beginning to characterize interactions between it and other cytoskeletal proteins via various biochemical and molecular biological methods. I hope to complete a paper on this work still this fall. I also plan to complete work visualizing synemin containing IFs via negative staining and rotary shadowing electron microscopy, as last school year I took an intensive two semester course in light and electron microscopy.

I have completed almost all of my course work and cumulative exams (which are a series of monthly exams during the first 2 years of study), and I will most likely take my prelims late spring or early summer of 1997. I plan to complete my Ph.D. at Iowa State... probably in about 3 more years.

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