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Wednesday, May 06, 2020
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Noyes 153 (J. Holmes Sturdivant Lecture Hall)

▶︎ CANCELED: Organic Chemistry Seminar

Chemical Biology of Protein Aggregation in the Membraneless Organelles and Stressed Proteome
Xin Zhang, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemistry, Pennsylvania State University,
Speaker's Bio:
Xin Zhang is the holder of the Paul Berg Early Career Professorship and assistant professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State, Zhang was a research associate at the Scripps Research Institute, California. He earned a doctoral degree at the California Institute of Technology in 2010, a master's degree at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2004, and a bachelor's degree at the University of Science and Technology of China in 2001. Zhang’s independent work at Penn State has received multiple honors and awards, including NIGMS MIRA in 2019, Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2019, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2018, the Lloyd and Dottie Huck Early Career Award for 2015 to 2016, the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award at the Scientific Interface for 2014 to 2019.

Protein aggregation is a multiple step process that involves misfolded soluble and insoluble aggregates. These molecular events have been associated with a variety of diseases that are termed as protein misfolding diseases. To meed this need, I will present a novel AggTag (Aggregation Tag) imaging method and two types of fluorogenic AggTag small molecule probes, with a goal to directly monitor the entire protein aggregation process in live cells, in particular the intermediate misfolded oligomers. The AggTag method and probes have been applied to reveal folding states of RNA-binding proteins in membraneless granules during their formation and maturation, providing new mechanisms underlying how cells use these granules to manage proteins in stressed conditions. This work potentiates future studies on chemical biology of protein aggregation in various types of membraneless organelles and stressed proteome.

For more information, please contact Rena Becerra Rasti by phone at 626-395-6151 or by email at [email protected].