The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Tom Muir, Ph.D., Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ‘65 Professor of Chemistry, chair, department of chemistry, Princeton University

Speaker bio(s)

Inteins are auto-processing domains found in organisms from all domains of life. These proteins are consummate molecular escape artists that spontaneously excise themselves, in a traceless manner, from proteins in which they are embedded. Chemical biologists have long exploited various facets of intein reactivity to modify proteins in myriad ways for both basic biological research as well as therapeutic applications. While many thousands of inteins have been identified at the sequence level, only a handful of these proteins have been characterized in any biochemical detail. Dr. Muir will discuss his laboratory's recent efforts to mine this genomic database, leading to the discovery of ultrafast split inteins that ligate proteins together several orders of magnitude faster than any inteins previously known. He will also discuss the remarkable folding properties of these split proteins, and how this has led to the development of new methods for the manipulation of protein structure in the test tube and in cells. The latter will be highlighted through the ability to manipulate the chemical structure of cellular chromatin.

 

Dr. Muir received his Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1993 under the direction of Robert Ramage. After postdoctoral studies with Stephen B.H. Kent at the Scripps Research Institute, he joined the faculty at The Rockefeller University in 1996, where he was the Richard E. Salomon Family Professor and director of the Pels Center of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Structural Biology. He moved to Princeton in 2011. Dr. Muir has won a number of honors for his research, including the Burroughs-Wellcome Fund New Investigator Award, the Pew Award in the Biomedical Sciences, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow Award, the Leonidas Zervas Award in Peptide Chemistry, the Irving Sigal Award from the Protein Society, the Vincent du Vigneaud Award in Peptide Chemistry, the Blavatnik Award from the New York Academy of Sciences, the Distinguished Teaching Award from The Rockefeller University, the Jeremy Knowles Award from the Royal Society of Chemistry and an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the American Chemical Society. Dr. Muir is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

 

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3776