Myers finds a new way
to look at proteins

Growing up as an aspiring artist, Sam Myers became interested in science later in life. When he took a human biology class at his junior college, it blew him away.

Sam Myers and his team developed genomic locus proteomics, which researchers can use to uncover mechanisms that underlie genetic phenomena.

Myers majored in biochemistry with an emphasis in chemistry at California Polytechnic State University and then did graduate work at the University of California, San Francisco, where he studied O-GlcNAc signaling in pluripotent stem cells in Al Burlingame’s lab. He did his postdoctoral research in Steven Carr’s proteomics laboratory at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is now a research scientist.

Myers knew he wanted to “bridge biology and technology development,” he said, especially as “science moves toward requiring more interdisciplinary approaches to research.”

He has developed a unique skill set to bridge this gap in the field of proteomics, an area of research with great potential for discovery, he said. “Many people work at the genomics level measuring RNA levels, but proteins and proteomes haven’t been studied nearly as much.”

Many sample types do not have enough material for proteomic analyses, so Myers has reduced the sample requirements needed to study the proteome, enabling researchers to answer new biological questions by looking at proteins at a single locus in the genome.

“This has been needed for a long time,” he said, and he just “had the perfect alignment” of scientific expertise in Cambridge. He was able to draw on the skills of Alice Ting (APEX2), Feng Zhang (Cas9) and Carr (quantitative proteomics) to perform this work.

In addition to doing research, Myers enjoys being part of outreach programs that get children interested in science, technology, engineering and math. He is able to connect with youngsters in part, he said, because “I don’t look like a typical scientist.”

When children see scientists who look like they could be artists or in a motorcycle gang, it makes the profession more accessible to more types of people, he said, and diversity is paramount for scientific progress.