Mike Strong spends most of his time analyzing the genome of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium and figuring out how its various proteins interact to produce tuberculosis in human lungs. Last year, in his spare time, he designed an Internet tutorial on bacterial genomics for a graduate course. And in his free hours, he occasionally takes up paint and brush to create precise and close-up portraits of DNA molecules.

If the theme of all this hasn't registered, Mike spells it out: "I'm pretty much obsessed with science," he says.

That obsession began in high school chemistry class, when he found that investigating things at the molecular level "piqued my curiosity," Mike says. Majoring in microbiology at UC Santa Barbara was "a nice extension of that interest," and he came to UCLA for graduate work because of its strong program in structural biology and functional genomics.

He found a home in David Eisenberg's laboratory, where he can do a little bit of each. Professor Eisenberg has created a great environment for research, Mike says. "He has a nice style of mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. He's always here for us if we have questions related to our research, but he also gives us the freedom to think about our research on our own and come up with new ideas."

Mike's new ideas have to do with the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium, an organism with about 4,000 genes. Each of these genes produces a protein, a metaphorical "molecular machine" that's responsible for the activity in cells. Trouble is, "we have no idea what half of them do," Mike says. With a team of collaborators, Mike has developed a visualization method that uses computer programs to build a hypothetical model of protein networks-representing pathways and functionally linked proteins. "We have high confidence links for about half of the genes," he says, "many of them previously uncharacterized."

Then Mike takes his hypotheses to the laboratory bench to get biochemical confirmation. A particular tuberculosis gene is cloned and then expressed in Escherichia coli, a less dangerous bacterium, for testing. Mike's dissertation will provide "a fairly complete analysis" of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacterium's genome, then show how that information can be used to design experiments and present results.

His analyses may help to explain why the tuberculosis bacterium remains latent in some people's lungs, while in other cases, it becomes active, killing 2 million to 3 million people worldwide every year. His work may also lead to new antibiotic treatments for tuberculosis strains that are resistant to existing drugs.

Along with his research project, teaching "is one of my favorite things at UCLA," Mike says. "I like to share my enthusiasm for science with my students. They can tell how excited I am about the things that they're working on." Mike believes that part of his job as a teaching assistant is to show undergraduates "what it can be like to be in graduate school or working in a lab-to show the excitement you can get out of science." Occasionally, students tell him that his class persuaded them to continue their scientific studies. "I live for those comments," he says.

His Web-based tutorial on bacterial genomics has been used by more than 100 graduate students, and through that tutorial, he says, "It's almost like I'll still be teaching at UCLA, even after I graduate."

Published in Spring 2004, Graduate Quarterly