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Cristy Gelling
School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences University of NSW
Cristy Gelling commenced her BSc in 1998 at the University of NSW with plans to become a plant ecologist. Although her major switched from ecology to genetics, her early preference for the fungal taxa must have been influential, because she eventually found herself working on Baker's yeast. Her Honours project, in the laboratory of Professor Ian Dawes of the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences, was to use microarrays to investigate the transcriptional regulation of folate-mediated one-carbon metabolism. Her thesis gained her the highest marks in her School and the University Medal in Genetics. This work eventually resulted in a first author publication in the Journal of Biological Chemistry.
Cristy's enthusiasm for the regulation of metabolism resulted in her pursuing a PhD in the Dawes laboratory, but this led in quite a different direction than anticipated. In investigating a putative folate enzyme homologue (Iba57p), Cristy discovered that it plays a novel role in iron-sulfur (Fe/S) cluster protein maturation. To test her hypothesis, she travelled to the laboratory of Professor Roland Lill at Philipps-Universiät, Marburg in Germany, where a powerful in vivo assay for Fe/S cluster maturation had been pioneered. In Marburg, she worked closely with Dr Ulrich Mühlenhoff and was able to show that Iba57p is substrate specific, being involved in the maturation and function of specific classes of mitochondrial Fe/S proteins. This work was published in Molecular and Cellular Biology.
The ASBMB Fellowship will allow Cristy to present her work at the American Cell Biology Meeting in San Francisco.
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This page last modified: July 11, 2008.