Patricia G. Voss

Patricia Voss is a Research Assistant in the laboratory of Dr. John Wang, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan. She received her undergraduate degree from Michigan State and a M.S. degree in biology from the University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, Mississippi).

She has had a wide-range of research experiences. For her Master’s thesis, she developed monoclonal antibodies and a ligand displacement assay for immunodiagnosis of Trichinosis in swine sera. In the laboratory of Dr. F.C. Steward at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York), she worked on the effect of growth factors on the physiology and development of plant tissue in culture. She has also worked, in the laboratory of Dr. Myron Levine at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, Michigan), on genetic mapping of the Herpes Simplex Virus and the replication of Vesicular Stomatitus Virus in cell cultures.

At Michigan State University, her work contributed critical aspects of the documentation that galectin-3 (Gal3) played a role in pre-mRNA splicing and that the protein was incorporated into the spliceosome through its association with the U1 snRNP particle. She found that Gal3 also interacts with the RNA polymerase II transcription factor TFII-I, a previously identified spliceosomal component. The NH2-terminal half of the Gal3 polypeptide is an intrinsically disordered domain containing tandem repeats of a PGAY motif. She showed that specific synthetic peptides and monoclonal antibodies perturbed the cell-free splicing assay, suggesting an involvement of this domain in the interaction of Gal3 with the splicing machinery. Finally, she documented that Gal3 is an immediate-early gene: when serum-starved quiescent fibroblasts were stimulated to proliferation by the addition of serum growth factors, there was an increase in the transcription of the Gal3 gene and accumulation of its mRNA. These increases were not dependent on de novo protein synthesis and they occurred well before the first wave of DNA synthesis.