POTSDAM — SUNY Potsdam Professor of Chemistry Dr. Fadi Bou-Abdallah has been awarded a research grant from the National Science Foundation to study how iron, an essential micronutrient required for most living organisms, is trafficked between cells.

The $1.1 million NSF grant will investigate the biochemical, biophysical, structural and cellular properties of key molecules involved in iron regulation and trafficking in humans.

The project will also unravel mechanistic details of previously uncharacterized protein-protein and protein-iron interactions, both at the molecular and cellular levels.

This new round of funding follows two previous research grants from the National Institutes of Health and NSF, totaling $865,000 together, to support Bou-Abdallah's research on a novel process to synthesize a variety of iron-storage proteins called isoferritins that he and his students have pioneered.

To date, Bou-Abdallah has secured more than $2.5 million in grant activities to study iron metabolism in humans.