Currents at USM

Duboise Boosts R&D with $1.5 Million Grants

S. Monroe Duboise, assistant professor of applied immunology and molecular biology, has received three grant awards that total about $1.5 million, including a major career grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his research on herpes viruses.

Duboise, who was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School before coming to USM in 1997, received a five-year NSF Career grant of more than $683,000 in support of his work in molecular genetic analysis of herpes viruses that infect cells of the immune system and lead to such diseases as mononucleosis and fatal cancers.

Duboise also is the lead principal investigator and one of the authors for an additional three-year grant from NSF’s Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 program, for $805,170 that will provide stipends to graduate assistants in the master’s program in Applied Immunology and Molecular Biology who will teach high school students. Other participants in this grant as co-authors and prinicipal investigators are Ah-Kau Ng, professor of applied immunology, and Stephen Pelsue, assistant professor of applied immunology, and Paula Haddow and Walter Allan, M.D., both at the Foundation for Blood Research (FBR) in Scarborough, a non-profit research institute that often partners with USM’s immunology and molecular biology program.
Duboise received a third grant for $145,000, an Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA), from the National Institutes of Health, also to support his virus research.

The NSF Career grant to Duboise is the first major award to USM’s new Bioscience Research Institute of Southern Maine (BRISM), where he has received a research appointment. BRISM was created to support R&D initiatives connected to the biotechnology industry. The new institute will be housed in an addition to the Science Building on the Portland campus that will be built through legislative funding and private donations.

"These grants are excellent examples of what we can achieve in the sciences at USM,” Brian Hodgkin, director of BRISM, said. “The science is cutting edge. The combination of research and education fits beautifully with our mission. The ScienceCorps project builds on a long standing partnership with the Foundation for Blood Research. Dr. Duboise deserves a lot of credit. We provided some infrastructure and resources, but he is the one who has been writing and re-writing proposals. That he has received three large grants now is really the payoff for that investment and work."

Before coming to USM, Duboise, who holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, worked as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular virology at Harvard Medical School, Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, conducting research at the New England Regional Primate Research Center.

Supported by the grant funding, Duboise will study gammaherpesvirus latency and persistence. His project explores how viruses interact with the immune systems of host organisms to facilitate permanent association with the host. His research focuses on gammaherpesviruses because, he says, these viruses exemplify a strategy that keeps the host from overcoming the virus, but usually with little damage to the host. Gammaherpesviruses accomplish this by “pirating” genes from the host that are not used by the virus in replicating itself but to adjust the host’s immune response to the presence of the virus and allow the virus to persist in the host.

The project, he says, “affords unparalleled opportunities to query the nature of the virus-host association using manipulations of both virus and host genetics.”

Duboise successfully made the case to NSF that, “The intriguing nature of known gammaherpesvirus-host interactions, the elegance of appropriate experimental methods including those that are standard to molecular biology, and the abundance of unanswered questions together provide a research framework that is well suited for integration into educational activities involving graduate students, undergraduates, and pre-college students and their teachers.”

The NIH AREA award is to study a viral protein that blocks apoptosis, the programmed cell death used by host organisms to resist the spread of viral infection.

As a teacher, Duboise uses aspects of his research to demonstrate theory in molecular biology labs and virology courses, giving undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to learn techniques used in manipulating viruses, such as cloning genes and running polymerase chain reactions. Several high school students also have worked on defined projects as interns in his lab, using basic molecular biological methods.

The grant project will continue to provide extensive opportunities for student participation. The additional NSF teaching fellow grant Duboise and his colleagues won for “A Maine ScienceCorps Promoting Excellence and Equity in High School Biological Science Education” will have dual impacts, providing support funds for graduate students to pursue master’s degrees and educational enrichment for high school students. The ScienceCorps program will use graduate students in immunology and molecular biology to take laboratory resources and inquiry-based activities into underfunded Maine classrooms. The grant will provide a stipend of $18,000 per year for each graduate student, which should alleviate the necessity of supporting themselves through off-campus jobs. Instead, they will work together with master high school teachers to develop science programs for high school biology classes and travel with equipment to rural schools that have inadequate access to laboratory facilities and equipment and up-to-date approaches to science. In return, the USM graduate students will benefit from the addition of teaching methodology and experience to their graduate curriculum.

This program builds on the success of ScienceWorks for ME, an ongoing program of laboratory workshops and summer institutes for high school students and teachers offered by USM in collaboration with FBR. ScienceCorps teams of two graduate fellows will work with teachers in incorporating new activities, developed and tested through ScienceWorks, into the classroom curriculum to better meet the requirements of the Maine Learning Results and other science education standards. The ScienceCorps proposal would not have been successful, Duboise says, without the strong record ScienceWorks has had in the state through the efforts of Professor Ng at USM and Haddow and Allan at FBR.

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