As an organic chemist at Harvard Medical School, Liz Jones loves to study how bonds are made and broken in the molecules in our bodies.
- By STEPHANIE DUTCHEN
She manipulates those bonds when building molecular probes to study the gut microbiome and developing potential new drugs to treat microbiome-related illnesses.
She also forges bonds among people, both as a scientist and as an Ultimate Frisbee coach.
"I'm super drawn to team environments," said Jones, research fellow in biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology in the Blavatnik Institute at HMS.
"I get a lot of satisfaction from reaching goals and being successful, but it means so much more when you get to share that with people," she said. "The same goes for failures. It feels a lot better to have humans to share that experience with."
The "why" of the world
Science seemed a natural fit for someone with Jones' curiosity about why and how things happen.
Jones said she was drawn to the intersection of chemistry and biology because it's one of the smallest scales people can study.
"I'm sure you could argue that physics is the next scale down, but that was more math than I wanted to do," she joked.
Learning how chemical reactions happen scratches that itch to know. So does revealing how chemistry can impact biological function - finding ways to use chemistry to deepen humanity's understanding of life and to treat disease.
"If you don't fundamentally understand how something is happening in the body or why a disease is progressing in a particular way, you're never going to develop exactly the right kinds of therapies," she said.
Jones enjoys trying to answer such fundamental questions in the lab of Sloan Devlin. The group focuses on exploring how human gut bacteria make a variety of substances called metabolites as well as on how those bacteria undergo or trigger biochemical transformations in the body.
Jones helps design small molecules the team can use as tools to study individual metabolites and biochemical reactions. She may also help develop the most promising molecules into drug candidates.
One of her current projects centers on fine-tuning a molecular tool to study why a gut bacterial enzyme performs a particular chemical transformation to human bile acids that renders those acids more likely to cause tissue damage and disease.
"Why would microbes need to do this?" she and her colleagues want to know. "Is it for their benefit? Is it for the host's benefit or harm?"
The goal is to have the molecular tool prevent the bacteria from doing the transformation in a rodent model so the team can learn what happens in the gut and liver. Such insights would help researchers better understand the gut microbiome's role in gastrointestinal and liver health and disease.
If preventing the bile acid transformation proves beneficial, Jones might find herself further tweaking the molecule to make it as good a candidate as possible for development as a human medicine.
Straddling two worlds
Jones' eagerness to connect fundamental science with medicine is reflected in a career path that spans academia and industry.
As an undergraduate in medicinal chemistry at Northeastern University, she participated in a co-op program that involved six-month internships in industry. Her master's degree at Northeastern, also in medicinal chemistry, featured research in an academic lab on tropical diseases. She then served as a medicinal chemist for three years at Ensemble Therapeutics before earning a PhD in synthetic chemistry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
