November 1, 2005

CCGS/School of Pharmacy professor Rihe Liu was recently awarded a four-year Research Scholar Grant from the American Cancer Society to fund his work on novel calmodulin-binding proteins in the ubiquitin-proteasome system. This system tightly controls a growing number of important cellular processes via the regulation of protein degradation. Despite decades of work, our understanding of the regulation of the ubiquitin-proteasome system is still limited. The Liu group has developed a novel approach called mRNA display to study protein-protein interactions on a proteome-wide scale. Using this approach, the Liu group recently found that several calmodulin-binding proteins are likely to be important for the regulation of ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation. With funding from ACS, Liu’s group plans to investigate how these proteins regulate various steps in this protein degradation pathway. Elucidation of the regulatory mechanisms behind the ubiquitin-proteasome system will hopefully provide opportunities for the development of more specific cancer interventions and therapeutics. More broadly, the Liu group is interested in defining protein-protein interaction networks, identifying enzyme-substrate and drug-protein interactions, and screening for antibody-like affinity molecules for biomarkers using in vitro protein selection approaches. For additional information, see Liu's CCGS webpage.