Professor Brian Kuhlman
Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, NC

Monday, November 12, 2007
3:00 pm (CT)
3269 Beckman Institute

Abstract

The focus of our work is protein design. Central to all of our projects is a computer program, called Rosetta, which identifies low energy sequences for target protein structures or complexes. Previously, we have used Rosetta to stabilize naturally occurring proteins and design a novel protein structure from scratch. Currently, we are using Rosetta to design protein-protein interactions. We have developed methods for enhancing the affinity of naturally occurring interactions, perturbing protein binding specificities and designing protein-protein interactions from scratch. Examples will be provided of all three applications. In one project, we are using Rosetta to redesign the ubiquitin pathway so that ubiquitin E3 ligases tag their substrates with a molecule other than ubiquitin, thus providing an approach for identifying unknown substrates.