When: 6 March, 2024, 15:30 - 16:30 CET
Speaker: Yun Liu, Center for Neutron Research, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Maryland, USA; Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Department, University of Delaware, Delaware, USA
Title: Protein internal dynamics and their relationship with the protein stability
Abstract
Significant progress over the past several decades has deepened our understanding of how biomolecules function. Our views have evolved to appreciate that biomolecules adopt diverse pools of conformations linked by dynamic equilibria. With this emerging paradigm, structure encodes dynamics, and dynamics determine function. However, compared with the large body of works to relate structures to the functions of biomolecules, the understanding of the relationship between intrinsic dynamics and functions is still at an early stage.
The intrinsic dynamics of proteins at their native states have a wide range of time and length scale. In this talk, I will present a couple of recent works to understand the intrinsic dynamics of monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and their relationship with the thermal stability. In the first example, the internal domain motions of a mAb were investigated at nanosecond scale with the neutron spin echo (NSE) and shown to strongly correlate with the thermal stability of the studied proteins. In the second example, hydrogen-deuterium exchange studied with small angle neutron scattering technique (HDX-SANS) was developed to measure the slow hydrogen-deuterium exchange on the order of hours. It is shown that the dynamics associated with the slow exchange of hydrogen and deuterium are a good indicator of the stability of proteins at high temperatures.
Bio
Dr. Yun Liu is currently a physicist at NIST Center for Neutron Research (NCNR) and also an affiliated professor at Department of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering in University of Delaware. His research interests cover colloidal science, biophysics, pharmaceutical materials, and gas adsorption and desorption in porous materials with over 170 publications. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Nuclear Science & Engineering Department at MIT, he joined NCNR first as a postdoc and then became a SANS instrument scientist at NCNR. Recently, his group has been focusing on applying neutron/x-ray/light scattering techniques to probe the protein-protein interaction, reversible protein association, and protein adsorption at interfaces.
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