Description
Jennifer Lee, Ph.D., is searching to find order in a chaotic system—and to discover how that chaos begins. She studies amyloids, highly disordered proteins that act like chameleons and change their shape and stability in ways that are bad for human health. Lee wants to better understand how and why these proteins function the way they do.
“Proteins have to fold and there are consequences to the cell when they do not,” said Lee, a senior investigator in NHLBI’s Division of Intramural Research, Laboratory of Protein Conformation and Dynamics. “This is where my research resides. We develop tools to investigate how these proteins behave, which is fundamentally important to understanding human health and disease.”
Lee has been focusing on alpha-synuclein, a protein associated with Parkinson’s disease, and Pmel17, the first human amyloid found to be beneficial for human health. Using physical and chemical techniques, she is investigating the structure of these proteins to see how they interact with other proteins and the cell environment. Fueled by her curiosity, Lee said it is important to understand how these proteins assemble and for scientists to identify their distinguishing features before they can think about designing drugs to target them.
"These proteins are fascinating, and we need information about them that is not currently available," said Lee. "It's an exciting time to work on amyloids."
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