3D Molecules and a Baby

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Yechun Xu held her newborn daughter You-Yang for the first time, she felt happy and hopeful, as do new mothers everywhere. Her husband Minjun Li, standing nearby, was happy too. The only thing missing was the chance to share their joy with the family members they had left behind in China, their homeland. The staff of the Kaplan Hospital in Rehovot did their best to make them feel at home; so did their friends and colleagues from the laboratory of Prof. Joel Sussman at the Weizmann Institute of Science, who went out of their way to play the role of extended family.

“I felt almost like a grandfather when You-Yang was born,” recalls Sussman, a member of Weizmann’s Structural Biology Department.

Sussman  first met Yechun at the Chinese Academy of Science’s Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, where she was a doctoral student. Sussman and Weizmann colleague Prof. Israel Silman collaborated with Yechun’s Shanghai Institute mentors on a study of Huperzine A, an herb extract used in Chinese folk medicine. In July 2005, after Yechun obtained her Ph.D., the Israeli scientists invited her to conduct postdoctoral research at the Weizmann Institute. Working under the guidance of Sussman and Silman, she and colleagues solved the three-dimensional structure of different crystal forms of the enzyme BACE1, and of the complexes it forms with an inhibitor. BACE1 is involved in the formation of plaques in the brain that are characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease. As reported in their paper in Acta Crystallographica D Biological Crystallography, this study might help design future anti-Alzheimer drugs.

Meanwhile, Yechun’s husband, engineer Minjun Li (they had met when both were undergraduate students in chemistry at the East China Normal University in Shanghai) had also decided to study abroad. He quit his job with an international company specializing in magnetic resonance equipment and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of Texas.