College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Right time, place and person

Three major funding organizations supporting BBMB's Reuben Peters' research.
First it was the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) quickly followed that.

But the latest is the greatest for Reuben Peters, assistant professor of biochemistry, biophysics and molecular biology.

The National Institute of Health (NIH) has awarded Peters and his research team a $1.4 million, five-year grant.

"I think it was the right time. I was in the right place. And I was the right person for all these grant opportunities,” Peters said. "I keep inventing things for us to do. I guess it's my intellectual curiosity.

"I've always had more ideas than I have people to work on them.”

That should be different with the NIH grant, which began in August of this year.

"With the NIH grant, that may change,” he continued. "We might finally have enough people for all these ideas.”

Peters' laboratory takes an interdisciplinary approach toward three interconnected themes including identifying the biosynthetic enzymes involved in producing terpenoid natural products of interest, understanding the diverse biochemical mechanisms contributing to the production of these natural products, and metabolic engineering to produce plant derived terpenoids.

Peters' plant of interest is rice and he is particularly interested in how rice makes natural antibiotics to fight off Blast disease. Approximately 10-30 percent of the world's total rice harvest is lost to this fungal disease.

"The genetic machinery required to make the natural antibiotics in rice shares a common evolutionary origin with plant hormone biosynthesis,” he said. "We're curious to find out how this evolution happens and what the implications are for other cereal crop plants. For example, it looks like corn makes the same type of natural antibiotics.”

He's also curious to see if a leap can be made from these rice antibiotics to molecules that will exhibit antibiotic, anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer activity in humans.

"There is an interrelationship between plant and human health,” he said. "We need food and we need to maintain our own health. My research group is in a position to see how these natural antibiotics impact plant health and, conversely, to find out if what works in plants could work in humans.”

The initial grant Peters' group received was a five-year, $800,000 NSF grant to study how gibberellin plant hormones are produced. The USDA grant is three years and $230,000 to look at how rice makes these gibberellin-related natural antibiotics.

With his NIH grant Peters will study how to make these types of plant-derived chemicals in large quantities, and look at related compounds that are made by Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Almost 3 million people die each year worldwide from tuberculosis, mostly in developing countries.

"One of our long-term goals is to see if can we use what we know about plant enzymes to inhibit these tuberculosis enzymes,” Peters said.

Peters' research is not only beginning to be noticed by the NIH, NSF and USDA but also by the Phytochemical Society of North America. The organization recently gave him its Young Investigator Award.