Dr. Timothy Jonas Eisen is a postdoctoral scholar at the UC Berkeley Department of Molecular and Cell Biology whose research aims to map protein structure in cells. He earned his PhD degree from the Whitehead Institute at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Originally from New Haven in Connecticut, Eisen said he was drawn to Berkeley because his line of research aligned with the scholarship he intended to pursue in his postdoctoral work. “When I joined the labs at Berkeley, I was really interested in these structures of proteins, but what's important to know about all these structures is that they are snapshots at one point in time,” he said, noting how protein reacts to the cells in the body rather than the structure itself.
“Normally we think about proteins like they're in meat and foods we eat but actually proteins are the workhorse of the molecular machines of the cell,” Eisen said. The defined interest in this field was driven by his fascination with the structural make-up of proteins.
“People have been very interested in trying to understand this question, what do proteins look like? What is their structure?” he asked. “They have a defined interaction, and they fold into these protein structures and these structures are important for them to perform their functions.”
The quest for learning about the structure of a protein is not only to understand its genetic makeup but also because it becomes crucial in understanding various diseases and how they impact human bodies. “Since about 1950 when people first started looking at protein structures, researchers have been developing libraries of different proteins and what they look like. This has informed not only a huge area of biology and how proteins work but it's really been crucial for disease[s],” he said.
Tied to his work at UC Berkeley, his research continues to document how to identify these proteins. The focus is to document the modifications in order to capture how proteins actually look like when they are in static environments.
“I was curious about trying to use all these data from our snapshots and apply them with the question of what are the proteins looking like in their native environment?” asked Eisen. This step in recognizing the cell in an active biological environment is what sets this work apart.
“You actually start appreciating behaviors that you could never have seen.”
The research revolves around the technological innovation required to use higher sequencing and developing methodologies to that effect. This cutting-edge research approach is made all the more interesting because Eisen said he really enjoys sequencing these patterns that are detected through observing data mapping these transformations.
“Science is hard, and it’s not always fun. But if you can find something you like to do every day then you can make it a little bit more fun,” he said. Part of the research involves sequencing the data in order to try to understand how the protein structures have evolved over centuries.
“Looking at sequences was really fun for me, and the reason it was fun was because I got to incorporate all these ideas about evolution and about mechanisms. It's all there in the sequence of the genome, which becomes the sequence of the mRNA, which becomes the sequence of the protein,” he elaborated on this line of interest.
However, research on this level of scientific rigor takes its toll. But Eisen said the results, most often not, outweigh the exasperations one faces undertaking such experiments.
“I would say it’s taken a very long time to figure out how to deal with failure,” he said. Eisen further argued that it is precisely because of certain failures that one starts seeing how science works in most cases. He says it can take years to understand something, but what changes is the outlook and you realize what is not working is helping you see what works.
“Most days, 90% of my experiments fail, but on better days, I can appreciate that these failures are actually teaching me something. They are a critical part of the process … Then this 10% of the time when experiments do work, it’s really magical.”