Keck Bridge Grant Supports Research into How Cells Build Essential Structures
Assistant professor Brooke Gardner is investigating how cells build vital internal compartments linked to metabolism, development, aging, and genetic disorders.
Keck Bridge Grant Supports Research into How Cells Build Essential Structures
Assistant professor Brooke Gardner is investigating how cells build vital internal compartments linked to metabolism, development, aging, and genetic disorders.
An investment from the W. M. Keck Foundation is helping UC Santa Barbara researchers push forward with ambitious, high-impact work across science and engineering—advancing discoveries that could reshape fields ranging from materials science to climate research.
Through the foundation’s Bridge Funding Initiative, UCSB has been awarded $1.2 million to support six innovative research projects led by early- and mid-career faculty and their graduate students. The program is designed to accelerate promising ideas at critical stages, enabling researchers to sustain momentum and pursue transformative breakthroughs. At UCSB, the selected projects reflect the university’s strength in interdisciplinary collaboration and its commitment to advancing fundamental science with real-world potential.
“We are deeply grateful to the W.M. Keck Foundation for its continued partnership with UCSB and for recognizing the importance of supporting bold, early-stage research,” said Rachel Segalman, vice chancellor of research and professor of materials and chemical engineering. “Supporting our faculty and students is essential to advancing discovery and enabling them to pursue ideas that can open entirely new directions in science and engineering.”
Building Cellular “Rooms” from Scratch
With support from the W. M. Keck Foundation Bridge Funding Program, Brooke Gardner, an assistant professor of molecular, cellular, and developmental biology, and PhD student Soham Chowdhury are advancing fundamental discoveries in cell biology, seeking to understand how cells build one of their most essential internal structures from the ground up.
Their project, “Building an organelle from scratch: a new model for de novo peroxisome biogenesis,” focuses on peroxisomes, small but vital compartments within cells that help regulate metabolism and enable cells to specialize. Despite their importance, scientists still do not fully understand how new peroxisomes are formed. The Keck grant has enabled the team to carry out a large-scale genetic screen, testing the role of hundreds of genes in this process, at a critical moment in the project.
“We are so appreciative of the Keck Funding – it really came at an important time for continuing our momentum,” said Gardner, who also recently received a prestigious Early CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation. “The Keck Bridge funding allowed us to purchase the siRNA library to test hundreds of genes at a time, make the purchase, and Soham was able to do the screen he had been planning for the past year.”
For Chowdhury, a fifth-year PhD student, the impact has been immediate.
“The Keck Bridge funding has already been transformative for my journey in the PhD program,” he said. “At a time when science funding and budgets are increasingly stretched thin, ambitious exploratory projects are often hard to find resources for.”
To explain their research, Gardner compares the cell to a house.
“Our bodies have organs which are tissues dedicated for specific functions, and our cells have organelles, which are regions dedicated for specific functions. Usually, the borders of these regions are defined by a membrane, similar to the walls in a house that separate different rooms.
“So how do you build a new room? And how do you define the room as something with an entirely new function in your house, such as a gym or a greenhouse? I think it is a really interesting questions because it gets at how a cell defines the identify of each of its organelles and how malleable that identity is.”
Chowdhury offers a complementary analogy, describing the cell as a factory where machines must be delivered to the right location.
“My job is to figure out the shipping system the factory uses to send the machines to the right location: the peroxisome,” he said.
Early findings have already challenged conventional thinking.
“The first candidate that came out of our screen was completely unexpected,” Gardner noted, pointing to evidence that cellular machinery previously thought to be unrelated may play a role in building new peroxisomes.
Chowdhury added that the team has now uncovered “interesting novel genes that we never expected to be involved,” discoveries that have evolved from puzzling observations into “a very robust finding.”
Beyond advancing basic science, the research holds long-term promise. Peroxisomes are linked to rare genetic disorders that cause a spectrum of symptoms, ranging from hearing loss to neurodegeneration, and they are increasingly being explored as tools for engineering new cellular functions.
“We are definitely still at the stages of asking very fundamental questions,” Gardner said, “but we are hopeful that what we learn will help us understand how to treat these disorders.”
For Chowdhury, the opportunity is both scientific and personal.
“This funding will allow me to complete my PhD with the rigor and attention to detail the science deserves, while advancing our understanding of mechanisms fundamental to cell biology.”
Other UCSB teams selected for Keck Bridge grants include Elaheh Ahmadi and Navid Kafi in electrical and computer engineering, Gen Li and Fan Liu in earth science, Angela Pitenis and Anthea Li in materials, Elizabeth Wilbanks and Victoria Jones in ecology, evolution, and marine biology, and Enoch Yeung and Aleczander Taylor in mechanical engineering. Read more about the other projects here.
About the W. M. Keck Foundation
The W. M. Keck Foundation was established in 1954 in Los Angeles by William Myron Keck, founder of The Superior Oil Company. One of the nation's largest philanthropic organizations, the W. M. Keck Foundation supports outstanding science, engineering and medical research. The Foundation also supports undergraduate education and maintains a program within Southern California to support arts and culture, education, health and community service projects.
Caption: Peroxisomes are organelles that are critical to early development and aging and are associated with severe metabolic disorders. Image provided by the Gardner Lab.
