Dr. Michael A. Wells
Regents Professor of Biochemistry
Ph.D. 1965, University of Kentucky
Research Interests
Dr Wells' Lab combines biochemical, physiological, and molecular biological approaches
in the study of insects. One area of interest is lipid and lipoprotein
metabolism, and we are focusing on the mechanism of lipoprotein biosynthesis
and the mechanisms of lipid delivery by lipoproteins to tissues. In
these studies they use yeast as a model system in which to analyze the
cellular components required for lipoprotein biosynthesis and assembly,
vertebrate tissue culture cells for expression cloning of lipoprotein
receptors, and site-directed mutagenesis and baculorivus expression
to produce lipoproteins with altered receptor binding properties.
A second area involves studies on the hormonal regulation of glycogen
and riacylglycerol deposition and mobilization. Currently within this study, they are
concentrating on the mechanism of lipid mobilization during flight
and have made significant progress in characterizing the details of
the signal transduction system and the properties of the target enzyme,
a triacylglycerol lipase. A third area involves studies on how blood feeding regulates the synthesis
of midgut trypsins in mosquitoes. There are two trypsins, early and
late, which have very different roles. Early trypsin synthesis is
regulated translationally following a blood meal and the enxymatic
activity of early trypsin acting on blood meal proteins in the lumen
of the midgut produces digestion products that are required for transcriptional
activation of the late trypsin gene within the midgut cells. late
trypsin is required for complete digestion of the blood meal proteins
whose amino acids are required for egg production.
We would like to thank all individuals within Dr. Wells lab for thier assistance. Specifically we would like to thank James Pennington and Patricia Scaraffia for their patience with our questions, and for walking us through a mosquito dissection. The time that Dr. Wells and his collegues spent with us during this semester helped foster a deeper understanding of the material and an excitement over the topic studied.
To read more about Dr. Wells and his research please visit his personal site.
University of Arizona Student Project
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