北京大学定量生物学中心

学术报告 

题  目：Helical Bundles, Metal Clusters, and alpha-Amyloids: De Novo Design of Proteins for Synthetic and Quantitative Biology

报告人：Shao-Qing Zhang, Ph.D.

Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF

Department of Chemistry at University of Pennsylvania

时    间：4月16日（周一）13:00-14:00

地    点：北京大学老化学楼东配楼101报告厅

主持人: 来鲁华 教授

摘 要:

De novo protein design is a powerful tool not only for understanding protein folding and function, but for building new proteins as potent circuit components for synthetic biology or as novel endogenous probes for quantitative biology. In my talk, I will first talk about de novo design of oxygen-ligated tetranuclear transition clusters in helical bundles. These structures are the first design of de novo multinuclear transition metal clusters in biological scaffolds. The studies pave the way for designing high-power redox-active metalloenzymes and endogenous MRI contrast agents. In the second part, I will talk about de novo design of amyloid fibrils composed of α-helices. The designed cross-α amyloid-like self-assembled suprastructures have a global geometry which is similar with that of the newly solved cryo-EM structures of tau and amyloid-β filaments. These designed α-amyloids can be a new molecular model for quantitative understanding of neurodegeneration.

报告人简介：

Dr. Shao-Qing Zhang obtained his B.S in physics at Peking University in 2004, his M.S. in the department of physics at University of Houston in 2006 and his Ph.D. at University of Pennsylvania. Then he took up a postdoc with prof. William F. DeGrado in the department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF and the department of Chemistry at University of Pennsylvania, focusing on protein de novo design.