Boxie Zhang

Abstract: The growth, sudden deterioration, and rescue of microtubules in the cell are critical to the normal functioning in cells including the transport of intracellular material, cell division, growth, and movement. This is assisted both by the innate polymerizing properties of the individual tubulin monomers, along with microtubule-associated proteins (MAPs). My project focused on the microtubule polymerase XMAP215 and its individual tubulin binding modules, the Tumor Overexpressed Gene domains (TOGs). Although two of the five TOGs were already well characterized when my lab had previously investigated the XMAP215 ortholog Stu2 and elucidated a quantitatively supported mechanistic model, the remaining 3 in XMAP215 are still poorly understood, resulting in a lack of informed hypotheses for a mechanistic model for XMAP215's polymerizing activity. Using cosedimentation assays I obtained an understanding of relative binding affinities between polymerized tubulin and each TOG domain, with each TOG domain binding progressively better to polymerized tubulin as it approaches the C terminus of XMAP215.

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​What does research mean to you? 
Research to me is my personal way of contributing something meaningful towards helping others, while giving myself a visceral sense of satisfaction that I feel like I can't get anywhere else.  The fact that I'm discovering something completely new, refining the method to do so, and sharing it with others is bordering on wish-fulfillment, and something I've dreamed about since I was a child. 
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Tell us about your journey.
I remember back in freshman orientation when Dr. Ladow was talking to us about research, for some reason my anxiety chose that particular time to flare up and scream at me that if I couldn't get into a lab for all 4 years then I was doomed to die in a ditch on the side of the street. So, I rushed about trying to find a lab that would take me in, and as luck would have it, Dr. Stefan, greatest lady in the world with 9 cats showed grace and let me enter her lab. It would be there that I'd first see the basics of how research works beyond the fantasies of stories, while also meeting some terrifically smart and kind people including my mentor who declared physical chemistry "his one true love" and another upperclassman who was actually in the Green Fellows program a year before me. In the meantime, I had also heard about Green Fellows during the summer before Freshman year and decided to design my entire 4-year degree plan around trying to get in and making room for it, taking on an overdramatic do or die attitude on the matter. Even as I managed to stop associating my self-worth purely with accomplishments, I'm somewhat glad that my single-minded devotion towards experiencing research remained and now that I've gotten into the program and finished it, I think it paid off marvelously.

What was your favorite part about the program?
I think being a part of the lab environment and working with full time research scientists and postdocs on a similar level was my favorite part of the program by far. Once I was taught how to do everything in the first few weeks, I worked almost completely independently with only intermittent guidance every week or two from my PI and the occasional requests for advice from my much more experienced coworkers. The knowledge that I was trusted to do novel research on my own was a childhood dream come true even if I sadly wasn't blowing up my lab every other day while designing scientifically accurate dragons and unicorns.

What was the biggest thing you learned from the program?
It's a bit hard to pinpoint one specific "biggest thing", but collecting everything together, I suppose that it would be accurate to say that I learned the most about what the life of full-time research is like. I had been doing research at UTD for a while now, but I didn't have my own personal project, and I certainly wasn't spending 8 to 12 hours a day in the lab, after all, I was a full-time student. The act of planning out an entire day's worth of experiments, making sure to finish what you can no matter what even if you're staying at the lab for an extra few hours, and the crushing feeling of over a week's worth of work being wiped out for one reason or another have become some things I'm intimately familiar with among many others.

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Advice for Future Green Fellows

Don't be afraid to ask for help, don't be afraid to reveal that you're absolutely clueless, and take ownership over what you're doing! You might technically be working in someone else's lab, but whatever project you're assigned, is not just some school project that you do for a grade, but a way to meaningfully contribute to the scientific community and the world at large. ​​