Please join us Tuesday, January 24, in-person, 3:30pm, BPB 131 for an MCB Faculty Seminar hosted by Dr. Andrei Alexandrescu
Our speaker will be Eugene Serebryany, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Harvard University
Discovering and engineering protein conformational landscapes and their phenotypic consequences
Summary: Serebryany will share a specific example of how a disulfide-trapped non-native protein conformation can lead to cataracts in the eye. He will then describe a new technology for revealing conformation-phenotype relationships in proteins via high-throughput disulfide scanning.
Bio: Eugene Serebryany is currently an NIH K99/R00 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Shakhnovich lab, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, where he focuses on inventing and applying chemical biology tools to discover phenotypic effects of non-native protein conformations; novel functions of human eye lens proteins and metabolites; mechanisms of protein aggregation and its pharmacological inhibition; and the role of disulfide bonds in protein misfolding. Serebryany’s first introduction to protein conformational dynamics came from studying ligand-binding cooperativity in a GPCR in the human brain as an undergraduate in the lab of Elsa C. Y. Yan, Dept. of Chemistry, Yale University. Over the next ten years – his Ph.D. with Jonathan A. King in MIT Biology and his current postdoctoral position – he elucidated a surprising molecular mechanism of cataract formation and proposed a safe and simple therapeutic for this highly prevalent disease whose only current treatment is surgery. Meanwhile, Serebryany developed a new chemical/structural technique, high-throughput disulfide scanning (HTDS), to advance fundamental research on sequence-conformation-phenotype relationships in proteins, applied research on conformationally selective drugs and stabilized vaccines, and the development of single-molecule protein sequencing technologies. HTDS has broad potential applications, including in understanding the biophysical basis of genotype-phenotype relationships in viruses and phages.
Link to publication 1
Link to publication 2
Serebryany website
In order to make our speaker feel welcome, please plan to attend In-person. In the case that a livestream is needed, click here: Livestream Link If you must join remotely, you can ask questions via email (rather than chat); please send questions to Jim Cole (james.cole@uconn.edu).
For more information, contact: Ashley Landon at ashley.landon@uconn.edu