Julianna Oláh (Hungary)
| I am Julianna Oláh from Hungary and at the moment I am working for the University of Bristol (UK) as a researcher in chemistry. I did my PhD at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and I used computers to study small molecules. Recently I got a fellowship from the EU to study enzymes and what happens to drugs in our liver. |
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You may ask me the question: "Do you use computers to study molecules? Shouldn't you be sitting in a lab making experiments?" During the past years computers and programmes have become much faster and more efficient. Compare for example your present mobile phone with and the one you had 5-6 years ago, what a big difference! Thanks to this improvement, we can use computers to solve chemical, physical and biological problems and better understand the world around us. Just to mention a few of examples: the green house effect and global warming, formation of galaxies, chemical reactions and human aging.
So I try to model enzymes and how they work. Our body contains millions of enzymes which make our life possible, for example respiration or digestion of food. My enzyme is found in our liver and transforms many drugs that we use as medicine to cure diseases. On the figure you can see what the enzyme looks like: the cartoons, lines and arrows show its structure. Each enzyme has an active site, where the chemical reaction takes place. This is usually a cavity buried in the enzyme. In this case, the active site is surrounded by the ring shown in white and several amino acids which are part of the colourful helices. We would like to
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Julianna Oláh's research |
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"see" what happens to drugs in this active site, how they move around and how the enzyme decides which part of the molecule to attack and transform. There is another problem that I would like to investigate. This enzyme has many variants and as a consequence some people transform some drugs much slower than others. This can be a serious problem, as these people may need to take a completely different amount of drugs, and what is healthy for one may be dangerous for the other. I hope that my contribution to this question will improve our understanding of drug transformation and help develop safer drugs.
So, that is all about my work, but life has other bright sides, too. When I started to do student research at the university in Budapest, I did not know it would change my whole life! First, with my results I went to Hungarian conferences, but later I participated in international ones where I met fantastic people, both young and old. My research made it possible that I could work first in Belgium and now in the UK, in really multicultural countries, especially when compared to Hungary. I have made lots of new friends from all over the world and I learnt new cultures and new languages. I would say suddenly the world opened up for me!
In my free time I love playing with children (there are more than ten under 10 years in my family!), cooking (chemistry in the kitchen: using our imagination to create new food!) and as a good meal is best when served with good drink: with my boy-friend we collect beer labels: there are more than 2 000 different beer labels in our collection!