James Bardwell

James C. Bardwell, Ph.D.

Rowena G. Matthews Collegiate Professor, MCDB HHMI Investigator
[email protected]
https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/bardwell-lab/

Howard Hughes Medical Investigator
Department of Molecular Cellular Developmental Biology
Program in Cellular Molecular Biology
University of Michigan Biophysics
Department of Biological Chemistry

Jim received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin in Molecular Biology. He then continued his studies in mRNA Stability at NCI, Bacterial Genetics at Harvard Medical School and Protein Folding at University of Regensburg in Germany. He has been affiliated with University of Michigan since 1996 and was appointed HHMI investigator in 2005. In Jim’s spare time he enjoys biking, kayaking, and giving tours to Natural History Museum visitors of the coral reef and octopus tanks in his office.

Proteins start life as linear amino acid sequences and end up as beautifully folded, active structures. Dr. Bardwell’s laboratory focuses on recently discovered machinery that drives protein folding in the cell. Powerful genetic, structural, and biophysical tools are being used to generate a detailed picture of how these folding machines work. Members of the Bardwell lab also use directed evolution to improve protein folding. They do this by asking organisms themselves to solve difficult protein-folding problems. By examining the solutions to these problems, they are better able to understand folding in the cell. Our studies include using techniques such as bacterial genetics, biochemistry, biophysics including NMR, X-ray crystallography, and cell biology, microscopy, RNA-seq, RNAi, and CRISPR knockouts
As a new project, Dr. Bardwell's lab plans to investigate the regeneration pathways found in jellyfish. Jellyfish possess superb regeneration powers to repair bodily damage. As their fragility has limited their use as a model organism, the labs work will include transferring the CRISPR/Cas9-mediated gene knockout and transgenesis capabilities, that Dr. Brady at MIT developed for Clytia, into the Cassiopee jellyfish. We will focus on regeneration pathways mediated by proteins that have human homologues like Wnt. Applying what we learn about regeneration pathways from these undisputed world-master regenerators may give us some clues about how to turn these pathways back on in humans.