Dave Punihaole, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry and a member of the Vermont Center for Cardiovascular and Brain Health, recently received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early-Career Development Program award, a prestigious grant that supports researchers who are early in their careers and undertaking new projects. Punihaole investigates the development of new chemical imaging methods for investigating protein folding in living cells. The NSF grant provides Punihaole with $665,769 over a five-year period for the project entitled “Directly Visualizing the Conformational Dynamics and Non-covalent Interactions of Biological Macromolecules in Living Cells using Fast Raman Relaxation Imaging.” 

This project seeks to transform the current understanding of how cells regulate protein folding. Proteins must fold into specific shapes to function correctly—misfolding is linked to diseases and genetic disorders—but most current tools can only observe this process in test tube environments, not within cells. To overcome this challenge, Punihaole aims to create a novel technique, called fast Raman relaxation imaging, to directly monitor protein folding structural dynamics in living cells. Success in this project could provide transformative insights into how different cellular environments, like the cytosol and mitochondria, influence protein folding, with impacts on neurodegenerative and cardiovascular disorders.

Research like this has contributed to the University of Vermont’s designation by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as an R1 institution, placing it in the top tier of research universities in the U.S.