Our story - Research news - On beer and bread
On beer and bread
December 1st, 2010
Jörg Heierhorst is passionate about yeast – the simple single-celled organism that helps us bake bread and brew beer. Despite his Germanic origins, he isn’t interested in brewing, rather his interest is in understanding how yeast's genes work.
When asked what yeast has brought to medical research, Jörg answers, “Yeast has been invaluable to medicine because it is an ideal model organism for human biology. A number of Nobel prizes were awarded as a result of work that originated in yeast, and yeast experiments also contributed greatly to the recent Nobel prize to Australian Elizabeth Blackburn in 2009.”
Jörg’s group first discovered a protein they called ASCIZ while looking for genes that responded to DNA damage in yeast. Since then, research in his group has focused on ASCIZ’s potential for improving cancer therapies.
The group recently showed that the protein is also essential for lung development in mice. The study, carried out in collaboration with Dr. Ian Smyth from Monash University and research groups in Queensland and Japan, was published in the prestigious journal PLoS Genetics. Jörg says that the importance of the protein for lung development was entirely unexpected. “We had been working on this gene for more than 5 years when we made the startling discovery that it has a second life as a key regulator of lung development. We found that mice lacking ASCIZ died in utero due to a complete absence of lungs.”
Jörg says that the research showing ASCIZ’s additional role in lung formation could have implications for the treatment of lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis. “It is widely believed that genes which regulate key events during embryonic development have similar roles in organregeneration. We hope that our discovery may be helpful in the future to come up with improved regenerative therapies to deal with deadly lung disorders such a cystic fibrosis or complications from asthma. Improved understanding of early lung development may also be helpful to promote lung maturation, the key medical problem in babies born prematurely”.
While Jörg may also enjoy the other uses of yeast, celebrating his recent discovery over a beer with his colleagues, he is adamant that his real appreciation of this simple organism is due to the important role it has played in medical research.