11th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 2 of 2): Professor Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, San Diego

11th Annual Stauffer Lectureship (Day 2 of 2): Professor Roger Y. Tsien, University of California, San Diego
Date
Thu May 11th 2006, 4:15 - 5:15pm
Event Sponsor
Chemistry Department
Location
Braun Auditorium

About the Seminar:

Part II: "Building Molecules to Spy on Cells and Tumors"

Fluorescent proteins from jellyfish and corals have been bred to eliminate multimerization, cover the entire visible spectrum, and report local dynamic signals such as redox potential, neurotransmitter concentrations, long-distance protein-protein interactions, and kindase vs. phosphatase activites. However, clinical applications should not require gene therapy or optical detection. Arginine-rich sequences are known to mediate uptake of a wide variety of contrast agents into cells and tissues in vivo. We find that such uptake can be prevented by appending certain polyanionic sequences and selectively re-activated by cleavage of the linker. This new mechanism can concentrate contrast agents in tissues expressing particular extracellular proteases, such as matrix metalloproteinases known to be crucial for tumor progression and metastasis. 

 

About the Speaker:

Roger Y. Tsien was born in New York City in 1952. He received his A.B. in Chemistry and Physics from Harvard College in 1972. A Marshall Scholarship took him to the Physiological Laboratory at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 and remained as a Research Fellow until 1981. He became a full Professor in the Department of Physiology-Anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1989 he moved to the University of California, San Diego, where he is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Professor in the Departments of Pharmacology and of Chemistry & Biochemistry. His honors include the W. Alden Spencer Award in Neurobiology from Columbia University (1991), the Artois-Baillet-Latour Health Prize, Belgium, the Gairdner Foundation International Award, Canada, and the American Heart Association Basic Research Prize (all in 1995), and the Pearse Prize of the Royal Microscopical Society (2000). In 2002 he received the Award for Creative Invention from the American Chemical Society, the Christian B. Anfinsen Award from the Protein Society, and the Heineken Prize for Biochemistry and Biophysics from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Tsien was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1998. 

Dr. Tsien's research has been at the interfaces between organic chemistry, cell biology, and neurobiology, starting long before such interdisciplinary efforts became fashionable. He is best known for designing and building molecules that either report or perturb signal transduction inside living cells. His current research goals are to understand how the spatial and temporal dynamics of signal transduction orchestrate complex cellular responses such as gene expression and synaptic plasticity. These goals will require improved molecular techniques to see and manipulate small-molecule messengers, protein phosphorylation, and protein-protein interaction in live cells and organisms.