Dr. Whitney Yin
Assistant Director
The University of Texas Medical Branch
USA
Biography
Will be updated soon!!
Research Interest
Structural and functional studies of antiviral drug toxicity Antiviral drugs based on nucleoside analogs are effective inhibitors for viral reverse transcriptase and RNA polymerase, thus have been successfully used in treating HIV and HCV infections. With prolonged patients life span, the success of the drugs now has to be balanced with their drug toxicity. One of the major target of nucleoside analogs is human mitochondrial DNA polymerase, Pol Y. Because drug efficacy is not completely correlated with drug toxicity, we believe there is exploitable difference in designing potent, low toxic antiviral reagents. To reveal the structural differences between viral target protein and human adverse reaction target, we embarked on structural and functional studies of replicating human mitochondrial DNA polymerase or stalled by antiviral drugs. My laboratory determined the first crystal structures of human Pol Y holoenzyme. Recently, we determined structures of ternary complex of Pol Y-DNA with a substrate or an antiHIV reagent, zalcitabine, lamivudine or emtricitabine. These structures provided unprecedented insight in Pol Y mediated antiviral drug toxicity. As Pol Y mutations are associated with multisystem disorders, the structures have been widely used by basic scientists as well as clinicians to understand the detrimental effects of the mutations.
Biography
Dr. Junji Iwahara received his PhD degree from University of Tokyo. Through his entire career, Dr. Iwahara has studied various aspects of protein-DNA interactions by using NMR spectroscopy. In his graduate work, he studied DNA-binding of centromere proteins by NMR. He received three years of postdoctoral training at Prof. Robert Clubb's laboratory of UCLA and conducted NMR studies of DNA recognition by gene-regulatory proteins. In 2002, he became a research fellow in the laboratory of Dr. Marius Clore (NIH). His research at NIH involved development of new NMR methods for macromolecular dynamics and kinetics. In particular, his publications on the paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) methods have been cited more than 1,000 times in total. In 2007, Dr. Iwahara joined the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) as a principal investigator. With strong support from UTMB's Sealy Center for Structural Biology and Molecular Biophysics (SCSB), his group enjoys a research environment well suited for biophysical studies. His current research focuses on the dynamic processes whereby transcription factors and DNA-modifying enzymes scan DNA and locate their target sites.
Research Interest
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Biography
Michal Linial is a Professor of Bioinformatics, Molecular and Computational Biology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HUJI). From 2012/13 she is the director of the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies (IIAS). ML is a founder and chair of the for Computational Biology educational program in HUJI. She serves in the Board of Directors and as a Vice-President of the International Society of Computational Biology and was selected as a fellow of the society (2016). ML contributed to the development of bioinformatics databases and websites that are open to the biomedical and life science communities on protein annotations and the link between sequence, structure and function. Her current research interests cover host-pathogen co-evolution, cancer genomics, protein family evolution, microRNA mode of action in extreme cellular conditions and researching the molecular basis of aging and metabolic diseases. She applies large-scale technologies including next generation sequencing and mass spectrometry for revealing the regulation levels cell in health and disease.
Research Interest
The dynamic processes of nerve terminals and the molecular aspects of synapse functioning, plasticity and maturation. The control of exocytosis in regulated secretory system of the parotid gland. Proteomics and Genomics approaches for studying differentiation, neurotransmitter phenotype acquisition and synapse formation in neuronal cell-lines. Bioinformatics - Large scale studies of biological sequences and their global organization. Proteomics, Structural and Functional Genomics.
