News

In December 2020 the Foundation made a grant to the University of Texas, Southwestern (UTSW) Medical Center in Dallas, to understand the biochemical functions of mysterious proteins called “pseudoenzymes.”  While our chromosomes contain genes to encode almost 3,000 enzymes with identified catalytic functions, there are many more which can be seen in the DNA sequence but with unknown functions.  Likewise, there are mystery genes in all non-human organisms, including those that infect us and cause disease.  In this Keck project, an early career investigator at UTSW, Vincent (Vinnie) Tagliabracci, and three coinvestigators (Krzysztof Pawlowski, Diana Tomchick and John Schoggins), set out to solve some of these mysteries and find functions for some pseudoenzymes.  The project soon turned to a very topical target: a pseudoenzyme in the COVID virus genome.  Vinnie and his team were able to show that a COVID gene called “nsp12” encodes a protein that completes the RNA genome of the virus by adding a chemical “cap” to its front end.  This cap is necessary for the virus to infect us, and so is a new possible target for anti-viral drugs.  Their work was published in Nature in 2022 and could lead to a new class of anti-viral drugs, useful against COVID and related coronaviruses.  More recently, they went on to test more than a third of a million compounds and found one that acts to inhibit the nsp12 viral RNA capping enzyme.  Since he received this Keck grant, Tagliabracci has been promoted to associate professor at UTSW, and he was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator (in 2021) and he received the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Biological Sciences from The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas in 2024.

Most of us have felt the frustration of getting our car washed, only to have it rained on shortly thereafter. It’s even more depressing after a fresh coat of wax! As you’ve probably seen, water on a freshly waxed car spontaneously forms droplets in a seemingly random pattern.

Keck Grantee Omar Saleh from the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) was interested in how microscopic droplet formation might govern how DNA is packaged and regulated in living cells.

To study this, Saleh’s team created DNA ‘nanostars’ that spontaneously form microscopic droplets in solution, just like raindrops beading up on the hood of a car. Surprisingly, they discovered that droplets which appear to be distributed randomly in space, actually show long-range order known as ‘hyperuniformity’. Hyperuniformity is thought to underlie processes as diverse as how wheat grains pack in a silo, to how the early universe was organized.

With Keck Foundation support, the UCSB team has discovered a tunable experimental system that will enable them to study many aspects of hyperuniformity that may have direct implications in disciplines ranging from astronomy to biology.

Empathy, the ability to emotionally understand and respond to what other people feel, is considered a core human value and a unifying force in society.  Empathy and empathy-induced altruism are poorly understood due to their inherent complexity.  In December 2020, the WMKF made a Keck Junior Faculty Award to Dr. Weizhe Hong at the University of California, Los Angeles to study the neural circuits of empathetic behavior in mice.  Dr. Hong used animal behavior assays and brain imaging with fluorescent reporters to investigate the role of specific brain regions and neuronal subpopulations in controlling empathetic social behaviors.  His team showed that mice comfort distressed partners through grooming behavior, and that neural activity in the medial amygdala encodes this behavior.  A second study discovered that mice help other mice in pain by licking their wounds.  They found that specific brain cells in the mice’s anterior cingulate cortex are active when they see another mouse in pain, and manipulating these neurons affected the licking behavior.  Their work resulted in six publications, including two papers in Nature.  Dr. Hong is now full professor and has recently received two honors at UCLA: the 2021 John H. Walsh Young Investigator Research Prize and the 2023 H. W. Magoun Distinguished Lectureship.

In June, the Foundation’s Board of Directors awarded grants to thirteen Research institutions, totaling $16.2 million. Abstracts for these grants have been released. Congratulations to all our grantees this cycle!

In a project funded by the W. M. Keck Foundation, Mohammed Hassan’s group at the University of Arizona generated the first attosecond electron pulses to develop the fastest electron microscope to date, which can image the motion of electrons in real time and space. As a first demonstration the researchers were able to image the electron motion in graphene. Attomicroscopy, is the new camera for capturing the invisible quantum world. Additionally, attomicroscopy in combination with cryo-electron microscopy, could be used to study the electronic response in biological systems.  In particular, electron tunneling in DNA, which drives changes in the conformation DNA, crucial to understanding carcinogenesis and mutagenesis mechanisms and processes that repair DNA damage. Attomicroscopy would also help investigate the potential of using biological molecules as building blocks for a new realm of molecular electronics in bioinformatics.

The W. M. Keck Foundation awarded Charles Drew University a $3 Million grant for a new state-of-the art health professions education building that will house the University’s medical degree program.