Join us on September 10th to hear Prof. Alanna Schepartz talk about “What do proteins and Nylon have in common?”
Time: Demonstrations by Synapse of Yale Scientific Magazine from 10am - 11am; Talk from 11am - noon.
About Alanna Schepartz: Our lab seeks to understand how macromolecular interactions control sophisticated biological processes such as information transfer, intracellular trafficking, and compartmentalization. Our approach is to develop new chemical, biophysical, and optical tools that control, manipulate, or mimic protein assemblies inside the cell, and use them to interrogate biology in ways that would otherwise be impossible. Current topics include: (1) the development and application of fluorogenic small molecules to monitor protein conformational changes associated with information transfer and; (2) organelle function and dynamics at super-resolution in live cells; (3) a wholesale re-engineering of the bacterial translation machinery to synthesize a/ß-peptides, polyketides, and sequence-defined polymer such as next-generation Kevlars, polyurethanes, and polyolefins; and (4) the discovery and characterization of a novel cellular machinery that facilitates the highly efficient endosomal release of protein therapeutics into the cytosol and nucleus of mammalian cells. Graduate students in our lab hail from all over Yale, including the departments of Chemistry, Cell Biology, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry. But no matter what their background, all students become expert in tools and techniques that span the chemistry-biology-bio-engineering continuum, from organic synthesis to structure determination and from cell biology to genetic engineering.