Our interests lie in unlocking the secrets of what allows these organisms to survive at such high temperatures. The research in the lab is focused on a class of enzymes known as NADH oxidases. Courtesy of Dennis Grogan, University of Cinncinati . Escherichia coli to produce cloned versions of NADH oxidases from the organisms Pyrococcus horikoshii and Sulfolobus solfataricus . Through these bioengineering techniques we are able to easily produce large amounts of these NADH oxidases.
Current research is involved in the purification and characterization of the enzymes.
In addition to characterizing the physical behavior of these enzymes, we are interested in correlating how the amino acid sequence of these enzymes correlates with their structure and function. We make extensive use of multiple sequence alignments and genetic database searches to try to elucidate the coding in the sequence that is responsible for both the remarkable thermostability and the catalytic activity of the NADH oxidases. While we are currently producing most of our enzymes from engineered E. coli cells, the lab is set up for doing both small and large scale growths of Sulfolobus cells for metabolic and enzymological studies. The cells are either grown in ovens capable of maintaining 80 o C temperatures, or in a specially designed high-temperature fermentor which is capable of growing large scale batches of Sulfolobus cells over periods of days or weeks.