Jacobs awarded $2M NIH grant for early investigators

William Jacobs, assistant professor of chemistry, has been awarded a National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences grant for early-stage investigators.

The Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) supports general research in the biological sciences, reinforcing the ongoing work of a lab without confining its researchers to deliverables normally associated with a specific project.

The $2M grant begins next month and extends over five years. It was awarded for the Jacobs Group’s work on biomolecular condensates.

“It’s a real vote of confidence in our science and our way of approaching these questions. This support for my lab over a long period will allow us to continue a number of projects,” said Jacobs. “I am thrilled to receive it.”

The goal of the grant is to provide early-stage investigators with greater stability and flexibility through funding that enhances overall scientific productivity and the possibility of breakthrough research. “This flexibility shifts emphasis away from specific aims and details of proposed experiments and toward the importance of the overall research questions,” according to the NIGMS MIRA grant website.

To be eligible, recipients must be within 10 years of the doctoral degree and be engaged in research that increases our understanding of biological processes.

Using theoretical and computational methods, Jacobs will deepen his investigations into biomolecular condensates. These are intracellular structures that organize cellular components like nucleic acids, proteins, and metabolites. Condensates are implicated in essential functions like gene transcription, protein synthesis, and cell signaling and are also believed to play a role in numerous pathological conditions.

But the determinants of condensate stability within the complex and crowded environment of living cells—and what mechanisms regulate their assembly—are not clearly understood. This forms the core mission of the Jacobs Group’s work.

Their research in this area has already yielded a number of important papers, including a fruitful collaboration with the Brangwynne Lab in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering.

“The two major areas that are described in this proposal investigate physical principles of condensates in heterogeneous systems,” said Jacobs. “One aspect of this work asks, how can such a complex, multicomponent environment form condensates in a very stable and reproducible way?

“Another major emphasis is on the interaction between condensates and chromatin. Our work in this area investigates how nucleation leads to the formation of chromatin-associated condensates at specific locations within the cell nucleus.

“For each of these two major thrusts we have immediate tasks and questions we want to answer,” he added. “I fully expect that these directions will evolve as we continue on these paths. This grant will allow us to keep pushing these projects forward.”