Thursday, April 13, 2023
4:00 PM -
5:00 PM
Spalding Laboratory 106 (Hartley Memorial Seminar Room)
Chemical Engineering Seminar
Series: Chemical Engineering Seminar
Characterizing Sugar Transporters with Biosensors and Cheminformatics
Prof. Lily Cheung,
Assistant Professor,
School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering,
Georgia Institute of Technology,
Speaker's Bio:
Lily Cheung got her research start as a sophomore at Rutgers University, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2008. She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2013. Under the supervision of Stanislav Shvartsman, she characterized gene regulatory networks controlling the development of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, using a combination of molecular biology, genetics, and reaction-diffusion modeling. During her postdoctoral training with Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, she designed biomolecular sensors to quantify sugar transport in plants. Her current interests include the use of high-throughput quantitative techniques and mathematical modeling to advance our understanding of how metabolic and gene regulatory networks interact to control plant growth. Lily is the recipient of a NSF NPGI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology, a NSF CAREER Award, and a Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Award.
Lily Cheung got her research start as a sophomore at Rutgers University, where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering in 2008. She then earned her Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from Princeton University in 2013. Under the supervision of Stanislav Shvartsman, she characterized gene regulatory networks controlling the development of the model organism Drosophila melanogaster, using a combination of molecular biology, genetics, and reaction-diffusion modeling. During her postdoctoral training with Wolf Frommer at the Carnegie Institution for Science, she designed biomolecular sensors to quantify sugar transport in plants. Her current interests include the use of high-throughput quantitative techniques and mathematical modeling to advance our understanding of how metabolic and gene regulatory networks interact to control plant growth. Lily is the recipient of a NSF NPGI Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology, a NSF CAREER Award, and a Human Frontier Science Program Early Career Award.
SWEETs are membrane sugar transporters that play critical roles in plant physiology and crop yields. We recently reported the design of a biosensor consisting of a plant SWEET and a conformation-sensitive fluorescent protein that translates sugar binding to the transporter into a fluorescence response. We named this biosensor SweetTrac1 and showed with a mass action kinetics model that changes in fluorescence intensity correspond to particular molecular events in the transport cycle. Furthermore, we demonstrate how biosensors combined with cheminformatics techniques can be used to decipher the variety of molecules that a transporter can recognize and provide suggestions on how to use biosensors for protein engineering.
Event Sponsors:
For more information, please contact Sadie Rubalcava by phone at 6263953654 or by email at [email protected].