Our Work
Our research interests lie in utilizing and developing physical chemistry as a tool to answer questions arising in biomedical and biological disciplines. The mapping of biological interactions and studying dynamics of biological systems is exciting to me. NMR, in principle, provides an excellent tool for studying a variety of properties of biological systems, including structure and dynamics of carbohydrates bound to proteins and dynamics of DNA.
01
HIV-1 p17
This project focuses on the interactions between p17, an HIV-1 protein, and heparan sulfate, a carbohydrate substrate that is found on the surface of all cells. When p17 binds to heparan sulfate, the virus is able to anchor to the cell and penetrate the cell to begin replication. In this lab, we plan to characterize this binding interaction with the use of NMR and computational modeling, where our goals are to identify the preferred binding of p17 to heparan sulfate, which could lead to future drug development.
02
DNA Dynamics
Many enzymes that interact with DNA are known to employ a base-flipping mechanism in which a single nucleotide is flipped out of the double-helix in order for the enzyme to perform its function. In this lab, we plan to use 31P NMR to study the backbone conformation of the DNA sequences interacting with these enzymes to determine whether there are any conserved characteristics or sites that may be interesting to study further with solid-state 2H NMR.
