Lessons with Lenny

What's so interesting about vaults? A lot! Take a deep dive with Dr. Rome (a.k.a. "The Vault Guy") to uncover the mystery of vaults and how they could potentially change the world one day.

Welcome to Lessons with Lenny!

New to Lessons with Lenny? This is the best place to start your scientific adventure with me, The Vault Guy!  

Episode 1 - Nano, Nano, Nano

What exactly is nano, and why should you care?  

Episode 2 - Taking a Cell-fie

Take a tour of the human cell and learn how vaults were first spotted.  

Episode 3 - Discovery or Debacle?

Was the vault discovery actually just a contaminating virus?  

Episode 4 - The Politics of Science Publication

Upon finding a new cell particle and naming it a vault, we furiously wrote up our results and sent in a manuscript for publication in one of the top science journals in the world.  

Episode 5 - Judges Score the Vault

After our first vault paper was published, it was time to apply for a research grant so we could continue studying this mysterious new particle.  

Episode 6 - Opening the Vault

Some biochemistry procedures seem like magic. SDS-PAGE, for example, sounds a lot like supercalifragilisticexpialidocious...but it’s not from Mary Poppins! I’ll show you how we analyzed the various vault components using this technique.  

Episode 7: Just Cloning Around

Science fiction writers like Huxley, Toffler and Levin used the term “clone” to describe making replicas of humans. Scientists may not be able to replicate humans today, but we do have tools that allow us to clone a variety of things. Let’s clone something today!  

Episode 8: What Makes a Vault a Vault

After we discovered a new particle called the vault, we learned that one of the vault proteins had already been found in a particle thought to be the key to aging. Could vaults be related to the “fountain of youth”? Are vaults midichlorians?  

Episode 9: Vaults...Now in 3D

We were using some pictures of vaults to guess what the 3D structure looked like. A little like groping around in the dark. By using cryo-electron microscopy we could finally see the actual vault structure. Was our barrel model correct? Instead of “vaults”, should we have named them “raspberries” or “hot dogs” or “hand grenades”!  

Episode 10: Express Yourself

We tried a simple experiment to make the major vault protein in a cell. This accomplishment would be like getting a single in baseball. We failed miserably…Instead, to our surprise, we hit a home run--we made vaults!  

Episode 11: The Resolution Solution

Once we solved a low-resolution structure of the vault, it was time to predict the location and orientation of MVP. We turned to X-ray crystallography for a high-resolution solution. Were our predictions about the vault structure correct?