Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Bradley Pentelute, MIT

Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Bradley Pentelute, MIT
Date
Wed January 20th 2021, 4:00 - 5:00pm
Location
Zoom

Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Bradley Pentelute, MIT (Host: Steven Banik)

About the Seminar

"Rapid response technologies for protein manufacturing and drug discovery"

Methods for the automated high-fidelity chemical production of proteins are needed. Proteins manufactured with mechanical machines, as opposed to bio-based systems, can bulletproof production circumventing endotoxin contamination and cell-line variability. Further, chemical synthesis enables the ability to rewire the covalent framework with non-natural amino acids, drugs, and carbohydrates. I will discuss the fully automated single-shot chemical synthesis of protein chains up to 220 amino acids in hours. After purification and folding, the synthetic proteins functioned analogously to ribosomally produced material. In addition, rapid protein synthesis enables accelerated drug discovery when combined with our single-shot affinity-selection mass spectrometry platform. I will discuss our results toward the discovery of high-affinity peptidomimetics that target oncoproteins or SARS-CoV-2.

About the Speaker

Bradley L. Pentelute, Associate Professor of Chemistry. He is also an Associate Member, Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, an Extramural Member of the MIT Koch Cancer Institute, and Member, Center for Environmental Health Sciences MIT. He received his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Chemistry from the University of Southern California, and his M.S and Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Chicago with Prof. Steve Kent.  He was a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Dr. R. John Collier at Harvard Medical School, Microbiology.