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When Michiko Taga began her post-doc at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2003, she never imagined that it would lead her to solving a longstanding mystery about vitamin B12, a vitamin that is fundamental to human health. The structure and biosynthesis of vitamin B12, the only vitamin that is produced solely by bacteria, had been almost entirely elucidated since its discovery in the 1920s.

Some neurodegenerative diseases appear only as we age, even if the associated mutations are present and expressed throughout life.  Former JCCF Fellow Michael Palladino started examining how such diseases change with time as a post-doc in Barry Ganetzky's lab at the University of Wisconsin in 2000-2002.

A growing number of diseases are associated with protein misfolding in the endoplasmic reticulum, including the chronic lung disease cystic fibrosis.  Since ending her JCCF Fellowship in 2005, Liz Miller has extended her endoplasmic reticulum work to include how protein folding influences the vesicle budding process – the first step of transport of proteins after they are synthesized.  "We've known for a long time that unfolded or misfolded proteins are not captured into transport vesicles," says Miller, who did her post-doc with Randy Scheckman at the University of California, Be

Before scientists had tools to perturb gene expression and look for molecular interactions, they poked and prodded cells to examine them.  Advancing that understanding of how cells respond to forces and displacements, former JCCF Fellow Margaret Gardel compares protein structures she builds outside the cell with how living cells generate and respond to forces.  Gardel says, "We now understand how different levels of forces generated by cells are regulated by different organizations and different motion dynamics of the [cell's] actin cytoskeleton."

In 2001, Rhiju Das – at the time a PhD student in theoretical physics at Stanford University – attended a scientific talk where he learned about biological machines known as ribosomes, the cellular workhorses that turn RNA into proteins. The atoms that make up this “machine” self-assemble into unique structures with exquisite precision. “This struck me as completely magical,” says Das.

­As a post-doc studying stem cell biology at Harvard University, Alice Chen found that she’d come full circle to the very questions that inspired her interest in science as a child. “The reason I went into science and developmental biology was seeing, as a kid, pictures of human embryos developing from fertilization through birth,” says Chen. “I was so enamored of it that I started to really get into science.”