A Song of Ice and Fire: Some Hot X-ray and Cold EM Findings

James Fraser

Univ. California San Francisco

Thursday, September 12, 2019 - 11:30am

Lederle Graduate Research Tower 1634

Reception and light refreshments at 11:00 a.m.

I'm never really sure what I'm going to talk about as there are many projects in the lab that I'm excited to tell folks about and hear feedback on! We use multitemperature (100-300K) X-ray crystallography to reveal temperature sensitive conformational states, which are often same ones used by evolution to create new functions, by small molecules in creating new binding sites, and by enzymes to transit through a catalytic cycle. Recently, we've been doing these experiments in a time-resolved manner. We also use cryoEM to characterize how macromolecular conformational landscapes change after post-translational modifications and to understand how novel macrocycles to the bacterial ribosome adopt new binding interactions and overcome antibiotic resistance. One thing I'm certain of is that my talk will feature the general theme of how macromolecular conformational ensembles can be accurately modeled from biophysical data and how that modeling process reveals changes in response to different perturbations.

Speaker Link:
Faculty Host: Jeanne Hardy
Event Contact:
Laura Sedberry
lsedberry@chem.umass.edu
(413) 545-2585