Skip to main content

Exit Seminar: Protein Engineering in the study of protein labeling and degradation

Date:
-
Location:
CP-114B
Speaker(s) / Presenter(s):
Xinyi Zhang

----------
Xinyi Zhang will be presenting her exit seminar, Protein engineering in the study of protein labeling and degradation.

Abstract:
Proteins as large macromolecules play important roles in nature. Due to the development of modern molecular biology techniques, protein engineering has emerged as a useful tool and found many applications ranging from food industry, environmental protection, to medical and life science. To construct biomimetic membranes, two critical aspects are the method of protein immobilization, and the production of stable membrane protein. This thesis contains two major parts, the first part is focused on the development and testing of method to immobilize active enzymes. Pyrophosphatase (PpaC) was chose as a model enzyme. A dual functional tag consist of histidine and methionine has been developed, in which histidine used for purification while methionine was metabolically replaced with azidohomoalanine (AHA) for immobilization. This tag is expected to be useful in general for many proteins. The second part is to advance our understanding of membrane protein stability and degradation. SsrA tagged membrane proteins has shown to be degraded by a cytosolic protease complex ClpXP. Here, the degradation of ssrA tagged membrane protein mechanosensitive Channel (MscS) was examined to elucidate the molecular mechanism of degradation.

Research Advisor: Dr. Yinan Wei