Department of Chemistry Seminar - Robert Newberry

Aberrant conformational changes in proteins drive a range of human diseases, notably in neurodegeneration. Ongoing challenges in the development of effective treatments result in part from insufficient molecular-level understanding of the pathogenic proteins themselves. For example, recent studies show that a single protein sequence can adopt a wide variety of misfolded structures that differ in their cellular activity, but the underlying conformational differences are poorly understood, as are the cellular pathways that mediate differences in phenotype. Without these insights, it is difficult to design molecules that precisely target each pathogenic species. In this seminar, I will discuss our lab’s efforts to overcome these limitations by integrating approaches from across chemistry and biology. I will first describe genetic strategies to understand some of the earliest events in cellular protein misfolding before moving on to the development of new molecules that inhibit the misfolding process.