ILSC Monthly Seminar: March 15, 2012

Cyanobacterial Hemoglobins: A New Light on an Ancient Family of Proteins

Speaker: Dr. Juliette Lecomte;
Department of Biophysics, Johns Hopkins University

Time/Place: Thursday, March 15th at 3:00 pm, 150 SMed

Abstract: Vertebrate globins have played prominent roles at several points in the history of molecular biology. They provided early evidence that proteins adopt native structures and that a single amino acid replacement could be the cause of disease. As sophisticated dioxygen transporters, they are at the basis of our understanding of cooperativity and allosteric change.  Globins, however, are an ancient family of proteins. They appear in many bacteria where they perform a variety of functions yet to be fully characterized. The presentation focues on the history of the globin fold and how it controls heme reactivity. Emphasis is placed on the application of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to monomeric cyanobacterial hemoglobins and how the technique can be used to gain fundamental insight in ligand binding, protein dynamics, and electron transfer processes.

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