| Affiliations: |
Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics
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| Project Leader: | Drake Mellott dmellott@tamu.edu Biochemistry and Biophysics |
| Faculty Mentor: |
Dr. Thomas Meek, Ph.D.
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Meeting Times:
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Friday at 10 am or Friday at 2:30 pm |
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Team Size:
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3 (Team Full)
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| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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The completion of this work will likely result in a publication that student(s) would receive co-authorship on. Students will have the opportunity to learn and become competent in synthetic chemistry practices, HPLC, liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), NMR spectroscopy, column chromatography, protein expression and purification, gel electrophoresis, western blotting, and enzyme assays. In addition, this research can count as 491 research credit if the student would like to enroll for this.
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Team Needs:
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We are seeking three motivated undergraduates who have an interest in synthetic organic chemistry and chemical biology research. These individuals must have completed at least two semesters of organic chemistry course and lab work in order to apply. An ideal candidate will have a chemistry related background, some experience in reading the scientific literature, experience setting up reactions and purifying organic molecules, and the ability to problem solve and work independently. A minimum of 20 hours a week in lab is required. Please send a CV and class schedule to apply.
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Description:
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Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), the world’s deadliest bacterial pathogen is responsible for the death of greater than 10 million people per year. Current therapies for Mtb are extremely long in duration and often ineffective owing to growing drug resistance. Our research focuses on the study of an essential, highly sought after drug target of Mtb, through inhibitor design, kinetics, structural studies, as well as understanding its complex regulation within the cell. Recent work from our lab has identified and characterized an enzyme that removes post translational modifications from this essential enzyme which may serve to modulate its activity. As such, we are employing chemical biology strategies to produce uniformly modified proteins to study their regulatory roles and structure-function relationships. This project mainly focuses on the synthesis and utilization of the synthesized molecules to site specifically modify this essential enzyme, allowing one to study the function and regulatory role of these modifications. The synthesis will include the preparation and purification of simple and complex organic molecules on scales ranging from small milligram to multi-gram quantities. Protein work will include the preparation of proteins that contain a non-natural amino acid that can be selectively chemically modified by the reagents synthesized.
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