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The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has named Grant King, PhD, a Hanna H. Gray Fellow — investing up to $1.5 million for up to eight years to help King achieve his goal of running his own lab.
He is among 25 selected in the newest cohort of the prestigious fellowship, which was established in 2016 to support early career scientists “who have demonstrated a commitment to making foundational discoveries while building an inclusive culture in academic science.”
The first four years of funding support postdoctoral studies, and the second four years helps fellows transition to starting an independent lab as a faculty member.
“It will be super helpful for my career,” King said. “Unlike most postdoctoral fellowships, this also provides funding for four years of your initial lab phase.”
King joined the lab of Harmit Malik, PhD, in 2023. He is the third researcher from that lab to win a Hanna Gray fellowship.
“Grant has a very strong intuition in genetics and depth of expertise in cell biology, making him a very strong candidate for the Hanna Gray fellowship, which seeks to appoint the academic leaders of tomorrow,” Malik said. “His interest in combining these skills with evolutionary biology makes for an ambitious, compelling program. However, I think his commitment to mentorship and to encouraging diversity in science is an attribute that made him an especially compelling candidate for this program, which values both science and leadership.”
Toro Moreno, PhD, won in 2022 and continues her work in the Malik lab. Jeannette Tenthorey, PhD, won in 2018 and in 2023, and has since established her own lab as an assistant professor at the University of California San Francisco.
“Harmit is good at securing this award,” King said. “He definitely has a little bit of a magic touch.”
Malik attributes that successful track record to Fred Hutch’s collaborative culture.
“The three Hanna Gray fellows in my lab [including Grant] all were or are co-mentored by other faculty, including Michael Emerman, PhD, Rasi Subramaniam, PhD and now Sue Biggins, PhD,” Malik said. “This co-mentorship provides a broader array of training and skills and a firmer foundation for the postdoc to launch their independent projects and careers. I am fortunate to live in this collaborative space where our trainees can thrive.”
A passion for life seen and unseen
The pursuit of knowledge runs deep in King’s family: His parents, two of his grandparents, and even one great-grandparent all received PhDs.
They indulged his curiosity about life, taking him to the Santa Barbara Zoo nearly every weekend and allowed him to keep pond scum in a closet for weeks to see what would emerge from the slime.
He was just as fascinated by the diversity of life he could not see — the world of microbes. In elementary school he invented a microbe-themed board game and dressed up as his idol, French chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur.
“For some reason, very early on, I decided that I liked microbes,” King said. “Still do. I still go to the zoo more often than your average person.”
He pursued his curiosity about life seen and unseen as an undergraduate biology major at Columbia University, working in bacteriology and virology labs. He also spent a semester living on the savanna as part of an ecology-based program in Kenya.
In graduate school at the University of California-Berkeley, he discovered a field that united his interests — evolutionary cell biology, which seeks to understand how cellular features arise and diversify over time.
“There’s not a huge number of people working in this area, though it’s definitely becoming more popular,” King said. “You really learn a lot about how a cell works and how it’s organized by looking across evolutionary time.”
King studies eukaryotic cells, which have a membrane-bound nucleus.
Humans are eukaryotes and so is budding yeast, a microscopic organism well known to bakers, brewers and vintners for its role in fermentation. It’s also a powerful model system for studying fundamental eukaryotic cell biology.
“It’s a wonderful organism and does everything you love: bread, beer, wine and it’s super great for biology,” King said.
He joined the UC Berkeley lab of Elçin Ünal, PhD and focused his studies on how budding yeast cells maintain quality control during meiosis when a cell divides into four daughter cells called gametes — the yeast equivalent of human sperm and egg.
He used two kinds of microscopy to generate images of organellar structures at a sub-cellular level (transmission electron microscopy) and to track the movement of genetically modified proteins in individual cells during meiosis (time-lapse fluorescence microscopy).
King and his colleagues made a surprising discovery.
During the final stage of meiosis, the nucleus divides five ways rather than the expected four ways to create four daughter cells.
Four compartments contain each of the new gametes, but a previously unknown fifth compartment also forms outside the gametes.
This extra compartment — which he and his co-authors of a study describing the discovery called the Gametogenesis Uninherited Nuclear Compartment, or GUNC — contains damaged and age-compromised molecular complexes that are segregated from the rest of the nuclear material transferred to the new gametes.
This gives the four daughter cells a fresh start without the age-related baggage, which is selectively destroyed by enzymes released from the parent cell.
In other words, the GUNC keeps the molecular gunk out of the next generation.
Making academic culture more inclusive takes time
The Hanna Gray Fellowship asks applicants to reflect on how the scientific community can be more inclusive.
“As a gay Arab man, I know what it feels like to not see myself reflected within the larger scientific community,” King responded. “When I came out of the closet, one of the first questions my parents asked me was: ‘Are there any famous gay scientists?’ Although I initially dismissed this concern, I have since been struck by how few LGBTQ+ scientists I have encountered at the top of the academic ladder.”
He also thinks about the responsibility he has as a cisgender male who sometimes passes for white to make the workplace more inclusive.
“Change takes time, especially in the academic system,” King said.
One change he would like to see is the de-stigmatization of mental illness.
King overcame obstacles imposed by obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that undermined his confidence in graduate school.
“When I was struggling with OCD, initially it was quite isolating and it affected my work every day,” he said.
He considered quitting science, but his UC Berkeley mentor, Ünal, provided the guidance and empathy he needed to stick with it.
“She helped me continue on the scientific path when I was going through that,” King said. “I realized there was a path forward for me and I’m definitely in a much better place than I was at the beginning, but I wouldn’t necessarily be there without supportive mentors. Because of that, I feel it’s important to acknowledge and discuss this because you almost never hear people talk about it in an open way.”
Long-term success rather than short term goals
In Malik’s lab, King is focusing on a new question: How do evolutionary innovations occur within the eukaryotic cell?
“[Malik] has a lot of experience finding these really cool examples of evolutionary adaptation, particularly in the context of arms races between hosts and a pathogen or some genetic material it’s interacting with,” King said.
King is particularly interested in an evolutionary innovation in budding yeast called a 2-micron plasmid — a small ring of DNA floating around outside the chromosomes that has finessed a delicate balance with its host over millions of years that enables it to catch a free ride with normal chromosomal DNA during cell division. Researchers call it chromosomal hitchhiking.
In general, eukaryotic plasmids are often short-lived, surviving only a few generations, but they sometimes contain genes outside of the chromosomes that can trigger cancer.
“Because of this, this genetic material is actually uncoupled from many of the rules that govern the segregation of cellular chromosomal DNA,” King said. “As a consequence, this DNA can have really dramatic impacts on a cell in terms of its fitness.”
The 2-micron plasmid isn’t giving yeast cancer, but studying how it’s managed to co-exist with its host for so long could shed light on how plasmids that could cause problems persist in humans.
“We’re really interested in this because it’s one of the rare cases where this type of extra-chromosomal DNA has sort of become domesticated,” King said. “It’s been able to survive in these budding yeast host for millions of years as opposed to just a few generations. We’re interested in how both the host and the plasmid have adapted to each other to achieve this really long-term existence.”
In 2023, King was named a 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow by the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation — a four-year, $300,000 award. He was the fourth researcher in Malik’s lab to win that honor.
Since the founding of the Hanna Gray Fellowship, HHMI has selected more than 140 fellows and more than 30 already run their own labs.
“This fellowship is among just a handful that puts the postdoc squarely in charge of their own destiny,” Malik said. “Having such a long period of support can encourage talented scientists like Grant to think of long-term success rather than short term goals. It will also undeniably make him a very strong candidate when he chooses to test the academic job market.”
