Event

Bioengineering Seminar Series: Teresa Head-Gordon

Friday, April 26, 2013
11:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Pepco Room, Jeong H. Kim Engineering Bldg.
Professor Silvina Matysiak
matysiak@umd.edu

Determining the Structural Ensemble of Intrinsically Disordered Disease Peptides using Computation and Experiment

Teresa Head-Gordon
Professor
Professor
Departments of Chemistry, Bioengineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
University of California, Berkeley

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) represent a new frontier in structural biology since their primary characteristic is that structures need to be characterized as diverse ensembles of conformational sub-states. In my talk I will review two general but very different ways for combining NMR spectroscopy with theoretical methods to derive structural ensembles for the disease IDPs amyloid-β 1-40 and amyloid-β 1-42, which are associated with Alzheimer’s Disease. Based on the best experimentally validated theoretical ensemble of the two amyloid peptides, it is now possible to produce a plausible molecular basis for why Aβ42 exhibits greater fibrillization rates than Aβ40.

Audience: Graduate  Faculty  Post-Docs