Expanding Your Horizons Workshop 2012

Over this past weekend, we provided a workshop as part of the Expanding Your Horizons Program here in San Antonio, TX. The Expanding Your Horizons program reaches out to girls in the 6th-8th grade and encourages them to pursue careers in STEM disciplines. Here a few pictures from our workshop. Enjoy!

Here we used balloons to demonstrate van der Waal's interactions.

One of our group members demonstrating electrostatic interactions

The students practicing electrostatic interactions

One of the students showing how the pieces of cracker are both attracted and repelled by the electrostatic interactions of the balloon.

Hydrophobic Interactions

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDevOumrquM&context=C3d49d1aADOEgsToPDskI9IY6BEyUIsShZLHjOg-9S

navigate to the link above for watching our first disordered protein seminar, presented by Aquila Dunn, Coskuner Group, UTSA.

http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.biophys.37.032807.125924?journalCode=biophys
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) lack stable tertiary and/or secondary structures under physiological conditions in vitro. They are highly abundant in nature and their functional repertoire complements the functions of ordered proteins. IDPs are involved in regulation, signaling, and control, where binding to multiple partners and high-specificity/low-affinity interactions play a crucial role. Functions of IDPs are tuned via alternative splicing and posttranslational modifications. Intrinsic disorder is a unique structural feature that enables IDPs to participate in both one-to-many and many-to-one signaling. Numerous IDPs are associated with human diseases, including cancer, cardiovascular disease, amyloidoses, neurodegenerative diseases, and diabetes. Overall, intriguing interconnections among intrinsic disorder, cell signaling, and human diseases suggest that protein conformational diseases may result not only from protein misfolding, but also from misidentification, missignaling, and unnatural or nonnative folding. IDPs, such as α-synuclein, tau protein, p53, and BRCA1, are attractive targets for drugs modulating protein-protein interactions. From these and other examples, novel strategies for drug discovery based on IDPs have been developed. To summarize work in this area, we are introducing the D² (disorder in disorders) concept.

Meeting

We will have a meeting on January 23 of 2012 that will be recorded and posted. The talks involve intrinsically disordered proteins in Parkinson's disease.

Proteins and Metals

About one third of the proteins in the human body contain metals. Metalloproteins are essential for basic processes in life, such as DNA synthesis, detoxification, nitrogen, oxygen and carbon transportation. Despite their crucial roles in basic life processes, interactions of metals with proteins can also cause severe diseases and death. To avoid such detrimental interactions in the human body, treatments that involve metal ion chelators or other small organic molecules as drugs need to be designed and synthesized. However, effective studies that aim to design new treatments require knowledge about the coordination chemistry between the metal and protein as well as the structure of the metalloprotein. Our group investigates the coordination chemistry mechanisms of biological transition metal ions, such as copper, zinc and iron with intrinsically disordered proteins that are at the center of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases, cancer, and cardiovascular diseases. We provide atomic level information with dynamics about the metalloprotein structures in solution. Even though all may sound easy, please know that these research activities are complex since it requires first the development of strategies and parameters using quantum mechanics and then the applications of  statistical mechanics and thermodynamics. It is fun to develop new methods and techniques and/or parameters and then to apply these on metalloproteins, which may help to find more effective treatments to severe diseases. When you think about how many millions of people and their loved ones are affected by specific severe diseases, such as neurodegenerative diseases, it is worth to work hard with the hope that our studies can provide important milestones towards finding better treatments.

The Coskuner Group's website is up and running! Check it out here and let us know what you think!

We wil be providing a workshop as part of the Expanding Your Horizons program on January 28, 2012! This program encourages girls in the 6th-8th grade to consider careers in science, technology, engineering, and math. To find out more about the program check out the link here!