EVENT DETAILS
ChBE fourth seminar of the Fall Quarter will be held on Thursday, October 13th at 9am in the Francis Searle Building, room 1441. ChBE's very own graduate students are presenting this Thursday, detailed information is given below:
Date & Time: Thursday, October 13th 9:00 am - 10:00 amLocation: Searle 1441 (refreshments will be available at 8:45am)Speaker: Jessica Perez, PhD candidate, Jewett LabTitle: Improving Genomically Recoded Escherichia coli for the Production of Proteins Containing Non-Standard Amino Acids AbstractThe genetic code, responsible for translating mRNA codons into the twenty standard amino acids used in protein synthesis, was once thought to be immutable. However, as we expanded our understanding of molecular biology, more variations in this genetic code were found across many species, allowing for non-standard, chemically diverse amino acids to be incorporated into proteins by the ribosome in vivo. By hijacking these mechanisms, expansion of the genetic code has the potential to transform how we synthesize materials and therapeutics, investigate protein structure, and understand the evolution of the translation system. A pioneering effort has recently developed an Escherichia coli strain lacking all TAG amber stop codons and release factor 1 which allows for more efficient genetic encoding of an additional non-standard amino. This strain however has not previously been optimized for protein production which is critical for industrial application and wide spread use. Here, I will describe the construction of a series of genomically recoded organisms that are optimized for protein production and have the additional ability to tune protein expression through a T7 RNA polymerase (T7RNAP). We found that reduction of nuclease and protease activity increases wildtype sfGFP production by 260% and sfGFP containing 2TAGs production by 225% and 560% with p-azidophenylalanine and N6-(propargyloxycarbonyl)-L-Lysine (ProCarb), respectively. Additionally, we constructed several strains containing an optimized IPTG inducible T7RNAP cassette which shows a 17-fold improvement in production of sfGFP containing 2TAGs with ProCarb. We envision that our library of strains will provide the community with multiple strain options for expression of proteins containing non-standard amino acids with increased protein yield and cell density which is crucial as the non-standard amino field grows.
Speaker: Gary Wilk, PhD candidate, Braun LabTitle: Identifying genomic variants that modulate microRNA regulation of gene expression in cancer Abstract
Cancer is a disease comprising dynamic changes in the genome that broadly affect gene expression and gene regulatory networks. microRNAs (miRNAs) are small RNA molecules in gene regulatory networks which negatively modulate gene expression post-transcriptionally. In mammalian cells miRNA targeting of genes is nonspecific and can be influenced by genetic variation. In recent years, miRNAs have gained widespread interest since aberrant miRNA regulation is associated with many diseases, most notably in cancer. Here we investigate how miRNAs regulate genes in cancer in the context of genetic variation. We mine multiple high-dimensional genomic and expression datasets from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), a free repository of genomic data across several cancer types, and integrate them into an analysis pipeline. Our pipeline identifies a) entire systems of genes that are dysregulated in tumors by miRNAs and b) genomic variants in those dysregulated systems that appear to influence miRNA regulation of gene expression in tumors. We then corroborate these results using computational biophysics techniques to better understand their physical basis.
TIME Thursday October 13, 2016 at 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM
LOCATION 1441 Frances Searle Building map it
ADD TO CALENDAR&group= echo $value['group_name']; ?>&location= echo htmlentities($value['location']); ?>&pipurl= echo $value['ppurl']; ?>" class="button_outlook_export">
CONTACT Iman Nasser iman.nasser@northwestern.edu
CALENDAR McCormick-Chemical and Biological Engineering