The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Eva Nogales, Ph.D., professor of biochemistry, biophysics and structural biology, University of California, Berkeley; senior faculty scientist, life sciences division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Speaker bio(s)

Initiation of eukaryotic gene transcription represents a major step in gene regulation, requiring the activity of a large number of protein complexes. The basal machinery includes RNA polymerase II (Pol II) and six general transcription factors (TFIIA, TFIIB, TFIID (or TBP), TFIIE, TFIIF, and TFIIH) that assemble into a ~2 MDa complex on core promoter DNA. This pre-initiation complex (PIC) is essential for transcription start site selection, promoter melting and Pol II promoter escape. Traditionally it has been very difficult to structurally characterize such assembly due to both its size and the difficulty in obtaining enough material. Three-dimensional cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an expanding structural biology technique that has recently undergone a quantum leap progression in its achievable resolution and its applicability to the study of challenging biological systems. Because crystallization is not required, only small amounts of sample are needed, and the technique has the potential to deal with compositional and conformational mixtures, cryo-EM can be used to investigate complete and fully functional macromolecular complexes in different functional states, providing a richness of biological insight. Dr. Nogales will present recent results using this methodology in the study of TFIID core promoter recognition and the architecture of the human PIC.

 

Dr. Nogales carried out her graduate studies at the Synchrotron Radiation Source in the UK, where she became interested in tubulin assembly and cryo-EM. In her postdoctoral work with Ken Downing at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, she used electron crystallography to produce the first atomic model of tubulin. After joining the molecular and cell biology department at UC Berkeley in 1998, her research interests broadened to include a number of molecular machines involved in nucleic acid transactions. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator since 2000, and she is presently the chair of the Berkeley Biophysics Graduate Program. Among other honors, Dr. Nogales has been the recipient of the Burton Award of the Microscopy Society of America, the Chabot Science Award for Excellence and the American Society for Cell Biology Early Career Award.

 

Today, Dr. Nogales' research is dedicated to the visualization of macromolecular function, using cryo-EM as a main experimental tool. She studies two different areas of essential eukaryotic biology: central dogma machinery in the control of gene expression, and cytoskeleton interaction and dynamics in cell division. The unifying principle in her work is the study of macromolecular assemblies as whole units of molecular function by direct visualization of their architecture, functional states, and regulatory interactions.

 

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=3744