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David Thompson from Purdue University will give a talk titled “Progress Toward New Tool Development for Accelerated Reaction Discovery and Protein Structure Determination” at 4 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 19 in Straz 163.

The Thompson Group has recently been focused in two new areas of research: [1] applying flow chemistry principles and real-time analytics to the continuous synthesis of active pharmaceutical ingredients (API), and the [2] creation of new materials to enable specific capture of a desired protein from cell lysate for high resolution structure analysis by cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM).

Flow Chemistry

Glass microreactors coupled with online electrospray mass spectrometry analysis have been used to query chemical reaction space with respect to temperature, solvent, stoichiometry, and accelerant to evaluate the efficiency and byproduct profile of three different API. Rapid screening of these variables enables the selection of optimized synthesis routes to the scalable production of these important agents for human therapeutic use.

Materials for Single Particle Reconstruction

We have synthesized and tested a family of lipidic, graphenic, and non-covalent polymer assemblies bearing high affinity ligands for immobilizing target biomolecules onto electron microscope grids for single particle reconstruction analysis (SPA) via cryoEM. Exposure of these materials to cell lysates enables the capture of several different protein targets, including his6-GroEL that yielded a medium resolution (8.1 Å) structure from ~5400 particles for SPA. This approach may help guide development of new therapeutics via structure-aided design.

See the full Natural Sciences Colloquium Series schedule