Meet the Prof - Vladimir Ladizhansky

Hi I'm Vlad Ladizhansky, Professor of Biophysics here in the Department of Physics of the University of Guelph. So you saw probably those NMR magnets right these are very they have very permanent magnetic fields so what you have there is a coil it's a little bit of kind of, let me preface, so there's a coil immersed in liquid helium and it cannot be turned off so if something gets stuck inside the magnet we're in big trouble. Okay so because you just can't take it, take it out though. It's really, really hard. So that happened probably one week after I joined my Master's degree lab. I was repairing a probe and I had a wrench in my hand and it got sucked into the magnet. So the wrench stuck there and I really tried hard to take it out. I simply could not do that. I cut my hands because I pulled like a really, really thin wire and then on the next morning two more people helped me take it out and that literally took three men to take it out. Right? It was really, really hard. It wasn't funny at all but now when I remember it, it is. I thought I would be fired, right?

I was born and grew up in Moscow many years ago I studied at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology majoring in hardcore physics. Then I moved to Israel to the Weizmann Institute of Science for my degrees, MST and PhD work where I became exposed to magnetic resonance and at that point I became very interested in everything related to magnetic resonance phenomena.

Is really an extremely versatile technique which can be applied to study small organic molecules, hard materials, biomolecules etc. etc. So once I moved to do my post-doc to the United States to MIT I became really exposed to biophysical aspect of NMR and bright end spectroscopy by itself because NMR as opposed to many other techniques is by itself a research field. So then I moved to Guelph, that was 2003 I think. Yeah, 20 years and I met some of my colleagues here in the Department specifically Leonid Brown who is a real biophysicist by education and he really got me involved in some of the protein studies that we did and since then that's what I've been doing. Studying membrane protein but using NMR spectroscopy. We're talking about structure, function, interactions with other molecules. Questions related to folding as well as some of the medically relevant questions. Since I was 7 years old I was really interested in chess and that was my main area and I was at some point contemplating becoming a professional chess player, believe it or not right, and I was always mathematically inclined... let's put it this way. So then towards the end of my high school I realized that I don't I'm not going to make it in chess because there are people much, much better than I was and at the same time I was became communicating with our neighbor who was actually a professor of physics and after that I started reading biographies of different physicists. Landau for example, books by Feynman and I was, I really enjoyed solving problems believe it or not right. Like physical problems and so after one year of intensive studies I ended up in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology studying physics, majoring in physics and that's basically how it went, right, and since then I've been enjoying this.

As I mentioned NMR is really a sort of field of research by itself and that was my original, so to speak, interest once I started my post-doc and then came here to Guelph.

But it is really applied science so it is essential to have good application so we study membrane proteins. Proteins that are found in cell membranes. They perform a variety of different functions specifically light sensitive molecules that absorb light and convert that energy of light into some kind of function. Can be production of proton gradient for example or signaling, etc. This is one aspect. Protein physical chemistry I would call it maybe?

And that is like the energy landscape of molecules. When proteins are synthesized they are synthesized produced as polypeptide chains that don't have a well-defined three-dimensional structure. Once they fold and become native there's a complex energy landscape which represents sort of a totality of all interactions, electrostatic interactions primarily in nature that define what the molecule is going to be at the end of this sort of long pathway in the native state.

How it happens, the details of that energy landscape, is what we really study.

We also look at protein dynamics, how molecules move. These are not rigid bodies. They have lots of internal motions on time scales ranging from picoseconds to really seconds.

Many of them are functional.

Many of them simply represent, you know, intrinsic stability of molecules.

This is of course of great interest.

And more recently I began a collaboration with Scott Ryan. He used to be at Guelph now he's in Calgary.

Who is really a neuroscientist. He's interested in, I would say everything which is related to Parkinson's Disease right and specifically there is a protein called alpha-synuclein which is the central player in this whole story and we study how it misfolds and how these misfolding events could cause Parkinson's specifically.

So our department is very collegial and that's I think the main kind of attraction.

People are very friendly.

People like each other.

People communicate really well and we have great students really and I enjoy interacting with students, of course.

I have five grad students some of them are co-supervised so I think three PhD students and two Master students and normally we also have one or two undergrads.

So our research is really interdisciplinary.

I don't like talking about physics versus chemistry versus biology because for us it's really everything and it's really sometimes hard to say.

I would say they are involved in all aspects of the work, right.

We try to tune it a little bit so those who come with the biochemistry background more work more in the biochemistry field physics and biophysics more on the spectroscopy side, but overall I would say students are involved in every aspect of the projects from sample preparation which is some pretty simple microbiology and biochemistry towards spectroscopy which is physics, computer science, to some extent a lot of data analysis and things like that, right.

So basically that's what students do.

It's a pretty steep learning curve I should say for most simply because again the field of spectroscopy is so complex of NMR spectroscopy is so complex.

I like challenges and there are plenty of challenges in research right. So these are not these are problems that do not necessarily have a solution and that's what really attracts me to those.