Rosie Barki/The Ithacan Professor Vicki Cameron extracts the enzyme CcO, believed to have an effect on aging. Cameron received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study the enzyme.

Vicki Cameron isn’t curing Alzheimer’s or slowing the process of aging. She is, however, researching an enzyme that is known to have an effect on the disease.

Cameron, professor and chairwoman of the biology department, has been awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant of $281,877 over four years is for Cameron and student researchers to continue the study of a protein vital to cell respiration and energy production.

Cameron has been researching the enzyme since 1983 during her graduate studies at University of Colorado at Boulder where she received her Ph.D. in molecular biology.

“It’s fairly typical that you will work on a particular system that you become an expert in that you will continue to study throughout your scientific career,” she said.

Cameron’s interest in the study of the enzyme, known as CcO, was sparked by a general curiosity about the way protein enzymes know how to go to the right “compartments” in cells, she said.

Her grant is not, however, just for the purpose of her own research. It also supports Ithaca College students who are researching with Cameron.

There are 16 undergraduate students working with Cameron and the grant allows them to work full time during the summer. Cameron said it is a valuable experience that gives students a great opportunity.

“Students get the opportunity to do research and to see whether this is the direction in which they actually want to go.

It is designed to train students to go into the scientific pipeline perhaps or pursue a Ph.D. or M.D,” she said.

Senior biology major Lynda Evans, who worked with Cameron this summer, said the experience this grant provided was invaluable. “It was a chance to see what working in a lab full time would be like,” she said.

The researchers worked 40 hours a week but were allowed flexible schedules to do their work.

While an experiment was being conducted that did not need immediate attention, they talked, played wiffle ball and even laughed at the other researchers playing volleyball in the hallway.

“It’s about the science, but it’s about the students also,” Cameron said.

During Cameron’s 18 years at the college, she has conducted research with 58 students and estimates that half have gone on to get a Ph.D. or M.D.

In her current research, Cameron has already learned that the enzyme CcO is correlated with, but does not directly cause, aging in humans.

The protein is essential in most organisms. If the protein is defective, the organism becomes sick or dies.

In recent years, Cameron said, “people who have studied aging and Alzheimer’s have shown that the amount of activity of this protein is reduced in people with Alzheimer’s and in old people.”

Alzheimer’s damages areas of the brain involved in memory, intelligence, judgment, language and behavior. It is the most common form of mental decline in older adults.

Cameron conducts her research by making structural changes to the molecules of CcO in yeast cells and monitoring the changes in the cell’s metabolism.

John Krout, director of the Gerontology Institute, recognized the value of her research.

“Solving the Alzheimer’s puzzle will take many investigators looking at many factors,” he said. “Understanding the underlying chemical and biological processes of the disease’s progression is very important.”