Chromatin: An expansive canvas for chemical biology

Chromatin: An expansive canvas for chemical biology

Chromatin: An expansive canvas for chemical biology (#1)

Tom W Muir ¹

Department of Chemistry, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States

Understanding protein function is at the heart of experimental biology. Perhaps one of grandest contemporary challenges in this area is to catalogue and then functionally characterize protein posttranslational modifications (PTMs). Modern analytical techniques reveal that most, if not all, proteins are modified at some point; it is nature’s way of imposing functional diversity on a polypeptide chain. Understanding the structural and functional consequences of all these PTMs is a devilishly hard problem. While standard molecular biology methods are of limited utility in this regard, modern protein chemistry has provided powerful methods that allow the detailed interrogation of protein PTMs. In this lecture I will highlight how protein semisynthesis methods can be used to probe a series of problems in chromatin biology. Particular emphasis will be given towards the development of new methods for the quantitative analysis of large encoded libraries of modified chromatins.

Authors contributing to this presentation.

Muir, T.W

Tom W. Muir received his B.Sc in chemistry from the University of Edinburgh in 1989 and his Ph.D. in chemistry from the same institute in 1993 under the direction of Professor Robert Ramage. After postdoc studies with Stephen B.H. Kent at The Scripps Research Institute, he joined the faculty of The Rockefeller University in 1996, where he was, until 2011, the Richard E. Salomon Family Professor and Director of the Pels Center of Chemistry, Biochemistry and Structural Biology. In 2011, Dr. Muir joined the faculty of Princeton University as the Van Zandt Williams Jr. Class of ’65 Professor of Chemistry. He served as Chair of the Chemistry Department until 2020. Muir is best known for developing methods for the preparation of proteins containing unnatural amino acids, posttranslational modifications and spectroscopic probes. These approaches are now widely employed in academia and industry. His current interests lie in the area of epigenetics, where he tries to illuminate how chemical changes to chromatin drive different cellular phenotypes.

Chromatin: An expansive canvas for chemical biology (#1)

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