Informal Seminar - Robert Chica | Tuesday, April 18th at 3 pm

Informal Seminar

Tuesday, April 18 at 3:00 pm in Broad 100

Speaker

Roberto Chica

Professor, Department of Chemistry and Biomolecular Sciences

University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada

Title

Harnessing conformational flexibility to design more efficient and selective enzymes

Abstract

Enzymes are flexible macromolecules that can sample multiple structural states, described by a conformational energy landscape. It is the relative stability of these conformational states, and the ability of enzymes to transition between them, that ultimately dictates enzymatic function. Yet, standard computational enzyme design algorithms use a single rigid protein scaffold as design template, ignoring the important contributions of conformational dynamics in enzyme catalysis. In the past few years, my group has developed multistate computational design methods that allow proteins to be modelled as structural ensembles that more realistically represent the range of conformations that these molecules can adopt, and applied them to the design of protein stability, binding specificity and conformational switching. In this seminar, I will describe our recent work on the application of these methods to accurately design more efficient artificial enzymes than previously possible and remodel an enzyme conformational landscape for altered substrate selectivity.

Host: Steve Mayo ([email protected]). Please contact Steve if you would like to meet with Roberto sometime between 1:00 and 2:30 pm on Tuesday, April 18.