Dr. Michael Koban
Assistant Professor
Department of Biology
School of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences
Morgan State University
1700 E. Coldspring Lane
Baltimore, Maryland 21251

Dixon 208
(tel) 443-885-4687 (Dixon 209)
(lab) 443-885-3474
mkoban@moac.morgan.edu

Biographical Sketch

I was born in Tokyo, Japan. My mother is Japanese and my father is American, although he is actually full-blooded Russian. At home, I'd speak English to my dad and Japanese to my mom. In 1969, when I was 16, we moved back to the U.S., spending a year in San Francisco. Talk about culture shock! It took more than an entire year to get used to people driving on the right side of the road and not the left side! We relocated to Anchorage, Alaska in 1970. At that time, the entire population of Alaska had about 300,000 people. That's less than one half the population of Baltimore today. I attended college in Anchorage and went north to Fairbanks for my Master's degree in zoology. I attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for my Ph.D. in physiology, and from there came to Johns Hopkins University for post-doctoral research in biochemistry and molecular biology.

My family and I liked living in Baltimore so I accepted a position with Becton Dickinson Advanced Diagnostics in 1987. There, I developed various diagnostic clinical chemistry tests to be used by hospitals and clinicians. Life in industry was quite nice. They pay you lot, for one thing. However, the downside is that if the program you're working in doesn't make enough money for the corporation, they cut it. That's what happened to many of us in 1994. Fortunately, I was in the right place at the right time and so I was able to come to Morgan State University. Here, I'm quite happy being able to do research I'm interested in and to be involved in teaching.

My wife is an attorney specializing in juvenile justice. Our son will graduate from a Big Ten university this year with a degree in political science and he hopes to get involved with policy making for a while before entering law school.

Research Interest

My laboratory is interested in understanding how animals respond to stress, both physiologically and biochemically. As you probably know, there are many forms of stress. Some human stress experiences include temperature stress and nutritional stress. We also commonly suffer from mental stress associated with pressures at work or in our studies, money worries, difficulties at home, and so forth. Now, if you add stress to another common human condition that leads to morbidity (illness) and mortality - obesity - what do you suppose happens?

Our main research program uses sleep deprivation as a potent stressor in rats. We also have a breeding colony of a strain of the Sprague Dawley white rat that has a predisposition to obesity. Our goal, therefore, is to combine obesity with stress to determine how and why changes occur in tissues and cells.
When sleep deprivation is enforced over many days in rats, a variety of pathologies develop. A particularly interesting observation is that sleep deprivation stress is accompanied by the animals beginning to eat an enormous amount of food. You might think that this hyperphagia should result in body weight gain, but remarkably, we find that body weight progressively declines. This means that the stressed animal is in a negative energy balance. In other words, energy usage is greater than energy intake. Thus, we are focusing our research efforts to better understand the physiological and biochemical mechanisms associated with this pathology.

Another area of interest to me is physiological ecology and how organisms in nature are affected by environmental stresses, including chemical pollutants.

Research Projects

Research activites related to stress induced by sleep deprivation:

• I am looking at how carbon flow changes in liver during sleep deprivation stress. Since we know that energy metabolism is greatly elevated by this stress, we hypothesize that anabolic metabolic pathways (net synthesis or growth) will be depressed, and that catabolic pathways for producing more energy will be increased. This study employs spectrophotometric determination of maximal catalytic activities of regulatory enzymes of key metabolic pathways such as the citric acid cycle and beta fatty acid oxidation.
• Kevin Swinson is investigating the expression of genes of sleep deprived animals in various metabolic pathways via RT-PCR. The study of UCP-1 expression in liver and Brown Adipose Tissue is also being investigated.
• Beverly Wolpert is investigating gene expression of UCP-2 and UCP-3 in sleep deprived stressed animals via RT-PCR.

Publications

1. Koban, M. and Kevin Swinson (In Press). Chronic REM-Sleep Deprivation of Rats Elevates Metabolic Rate and Increases Uncoupling Protein-1 Gene Expression in Brown Adipose Tissue.(2005, American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism)

2. Koban, M and Kevin Swinson . FORMAzol as an RNA Storage Medium: A Cautionary Note When Performing RT-PCR. (In review, Journal of Biochemical and Biophysical Methods).
3. Koban, M., Wolpert, B., Harriot, A. REM-Sleep Deprivation Alters Body Composition of Rats.(In review, Cellular and Molecular Biology)
4. Koban, M. and Craig V. Stewart. Age Related changes in Food Consumption and Body Weight During Sleep Deprivation Stress in Rats. (In revision, Physiology and Behavior).
5. Koban, M. Sleep deprivation stress up-regulates heat-shock proteins (manuscript in preparation).
6. Koban, M., J. Wood, D. Bruchey, and R. Vallejo (1992). affinity® automated enzyme immunoassay for progesterone. Clin. Chem. 38:1094.
7. Koban, M. (1991). Contributions to "Temperature" chapter; in Environmental and Metabolic Animal Physiology of Comparative Animal Physiology, 4th edition, C. L. Prosser, editor.
8. Koban, M., A.A. Yup, L.B. Agellon, and D.A. Powers (1991). Molecular adaptation to the thermal environment. Heat shock response of the eurythermal teleost Fundulus heteroclitus. Molec. Mar. Biol. Biotech. 1:1-17.
9. Koban, M., E. Hale, J. Sanders, J. Blackwell, A. Ozinskas, V. Crews, and R. Vallejo (1990). An automated immunoenzymetric TSH assay for the affinity® system. Clin. Chem. 36:1082.
10. Kent, J.D., M. Koban, and C.L. Prosser (1988). Cold acclimation induced protein hypertrophy in channel catfish and green sunfish. J. Comp. Physiol. B 158:185-198.
11. Koban, M., G. Graham, and C.L. Prosser (1987). Induction of heat-shock protein synthesis in teleost hepatocytes. Effects of acclimation temperature. Physiol. Zool. 60:290-296.
12. Koban, M. (1986). Can cultured teleost hepatocytes show temperature acclimation? Amer. J. Physiol. 250:R211-R220. [Abstract]
13. Koban, M. and D.D. Feist (1982). The effect of cold on norepinephrine turnover in tissues of seasonally acclimatized redpolls (Carduelis flammea). J. Comp. Physiol. B 146:133-144.