ILSC Monthly Seminar: May 2011

Macromolecular Crowding & Protein Chemistry: Views from Inside & Outside Cells

Speaker: Dr. Gary J. Pielak; Professor, Department of Chemistry; University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Time/Place: Thursday, May 26th at 3:00 pm, 130 SMed

Abstract: I will discuss the successes and challenges of in-cell protein NMR and the quantification of protein folding, stability, and diffusion under crowded conditions. One challenge is the inability to observe 15N-1H HSQC spectra from most globular proteins in cells. To understand this problem we turned to in vitro experiments, using synthetic polymers, globular proteins, and cell lysates to assess how these crowding agents affect protein diffusion. To examine stability, we used NMR-detected amide-proton exchange to quantify the opening free energy of test proteins in the presence of crowding agents. To examine folding in cells, we applied ¹⁹F NMR to an unstable test protein. Our results highlight the differences between crowding agents and shed light on the biological effects of crowding.

2013

2012

January: David D. Thomas
February: Elizabeth Austin-Minor
March: Juliette Lecomte
April: David Millar
May: Lukas Tamm
September: David Millar
September: Dongping Zhong
October: Jonathan V. Rocheleau
November: Yevgenya Grinblat
December: Michael Graner

2011

2010