by Kara Petrovic // Fall 2010
Erika Geisbrecht, assistant professor of biology at the UMKC School of Biological Sciences, received a three-year $50,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health’s department of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases to study the role of the Limb-Girdle Muscular Dystrophy TRIM32 protein that over time causes a loss of muscle bulk and strength around the hips and shoulders. Geisbrecht is using the fruit fly as a model to study how defects in TRIM32 function may result in muscle wasting in humans. “My hope with this grant,” Geisbrecht says, “is to expand our research program into trying to identify more proteins that are required for muscle maintenance.”