For Erynn Johnson, a 2019 Union College graduate, every day looks different. As a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate working in a biochemistry research laboratory, she is responsible for running experiments, training undergraduate students, documenting and presenting her results, and caring for more than a thousand mice.
Johnson is part of a long line of researchers seeking to improve our understanding of the human body. “Growing up, I was always really drawn to stories about how the applications of chemistry have grown and changed and how scientists have advanced our understanding of chemistry over the years — how chemistry has contributed to different events throughout history, to the technology in medicine and in our health,” she said. “I just love how biochemistry forms the basis of everything we do and who we are.”
After graduating from Union with a degree in chemistry, Johnson was accepted to the University of Minnesota’s biochemistry Ph.D. program. There she joined Dr. James Ervasti’s lab studying Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), a rare neuromuscular wasting disease with a genetic origin. This condition, usually found in boys, is caused by a mutation in the gene for the protein dystrophin. Dystrophin is essential in maintaining muscle health and function. Men with this disease usually only live until their twenties or thirties and are wheelchair bound by the time they are in their teens due to muscle wasting.
“I’m studying DMD using the mdx mouse model of the disease,” said Johnson. “These mice have the same mutation that causes loss of dystrophin protein. Right before I joined the lab, they published a paper that showed these mice are uniquely susceptible to stress and will actually die if they are exposed to a stressful enough event. I’m interested in finding out what the biochemical origin of that stress phenotype is. And so I’ve been using analytical and traditional biochemical techniques to get to the metabolism level and try to determine if there are protein or metabolic factors that cause these mice to become susceptible to stress.”
With this research, Johnson and her team hope to improve the lives of DMD patients. She said, “These patients have huge stressors in their lives, from chronic muscle fatigue and becoming wheelchair bound at a young age to visits to the hospital and surgeries and being a chronic patient. We’re interested in determining if there are better ways to help manage and mitigate that stress in their lives and determine if these efforts benefit the disease course.”
The paper written by Johnson and her lab partners, “Retention of stress susceptibility in the mdx mouse model of Duchenne muscular dystrophy after PGC-1α overexpression or ablation of IDO1 or CD38,” was published in Oxford Academic’s journal, “Human Molecular Genetics” this January. She is planning to use this work as the foundation of her dissertation. She said, “the ultimate goal is to investigate stress susceptibility in the mdx mouse model of DMD. I have another project that I’m working on right now and hoping to publish as well, and the paper I just published and the one I’m working on will comprise my dissertation.”
Johnson’s interest in biochemistry began while she was in high school. “I started getting interested in nutrition, and my family and I changed our diet to be able to lead a healthier lifestyle and prevent metabolic disease. That got me interested in reading papers related to dietary strategies and metabolism which drew me toward a research career.”
When it came time for Johnson to pick an undergraduate program, choosing Union was easy. Her parents, Dave and Shelly, are also Union alumni, and Shelly currently works in Union’s enrollment office. Johnson grew up in Lincoln and even attended George Stone School, Union’s teacher-training laboratory school. “I like to say that I was going to Union in the second grade,” she laughed.
During Johnson’s time in Union’s chemistry program, she especially appreciated her professors and mentors. She said, “All my chemistry professors were excellent: Dr. Wolfe, Dr. Osborne, and Dr. Clarke. Dr. Christina Burden-Page was also a wonderful mentor. I took physiology from her my senior year, and that’s what gave me the background in biochemistry and human physiology. It was a really fun course. I HeartScanned with Stan Hardt and I still talk with him today. He lives up here in Minnesota part of the year, and he’s just been an excellent mentor and really great friend in my life.”
In addition to building relationships, Johnson also gained plenty of hands-on experience during her undergraduate years. She learned chemistry research techniques as well as scientific glassblowing in Dr. Ken Osborn’s thermodynamics class. “I got exposure to a lot of cool stuff,” she said. Through her advisor, Dr. Carrie Wolfe, Johnson had the opportunity to spend a summer as a student researcher at UNL, studying drug-protein interactions. The next summer, she worked as a research assistant at Purdue University. There she studied gas phase fragmentation, and the work her lab team produced was published in “International Journal of Mass Spectrometry.”
After Johnson receives her doctorate, she plans to continue her career outside of academia in the biotech industry. “Currently I’m undecided between a few different career routes,” she said. “R&D science is interesting to me as well as being a medical science liaison or a medical or scientific writer.” Either way, Johnson’s goal to improve the quality of life for humanity remains the same.