Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Itaru Hamachi, Kyoto University
Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Itaru Hamachi, Kyoto University, Sapp Center Lecture Hall, 4:30pm (Host: Eric Kool)
About the Seminar:
"Live-cell organic chemistry of proteins for deciphering their functions in natural habitat"
Traditionally, proteins analysis has been conducted under the purified dilute aqueous conditions in most cases. However, it is recently being recognized that structure and functions of natural proteins in live systems are rather different from those under such pure conditions, and thus the protein should be studied in vivo more-details for deep understanding of these biomolecules. For such objectives, development of chemical methods to selectively label, image and regulate a target protein under live cell conditions is now highly desired in the recent chemical biology research. I describe here our recent progress in chemistry-based methods for specific labeling of endogenously expressed proteins driven by coupling of selective molecular recognition and reaction, so-called ligand-directed chemistry (LDchem), under live cell conditions. In LDchem, a reactive and cleavable linker is designed to connect a ligand for selective recognition to a protein-of-interest (POI) with a probe to be tethered to the protein surface. LDchem allows for the protein and site selective labeling driven by the proximity effect in live cells, as well as cell lysates and a pure sample of test tubes. The targets are being now extended to various membrane-bound proteins such as folate receptor, GPCR and neurotransmitter receptors (GluR and GABAR) and intracellular proteins. My group believes that such a new chemistry may facilitate various aspects of fundamental chemical researches, in addition to diagnostic or pharmaceutical applications.
References Hamachi, I., et.al., Angew. Chem. Int. Ed., 2013, 52, 4088 (review), Nature ChemBio., 2009, 5, 341, Nature ChemBio., 2016, 12, 833. Nature Chem., 2009, 1, 557, Nature Chem., 2016, 8, 958.Nature Meth., 2016, 13, 931
About the Speaker:
Itaru Hamachi received his Ph.D. degree from Kyoto University in 1988 (Profs. Teruo Matsuura and (late) Iwao Tabushi). He was appointed as Assistant Professor at Kyushu University, Faculty of Engineering, in 1988 (Prof. Toyoki Kunitake). He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1992 in Kyushu University (Prof. Seiji Shinkai), and was subsequently promoted to Full Professor of Institute of Fundamental Organic Chemistry in Kyushu University in 2001. He moved to Department of Synthetic Chemistry and was the recipient of Chemical Society of Japan Award for Creative Work (2006) and Nagoya Silver Medal (2014). He is now a fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry (UK). He was a PREST investigator since 1999-2006 and now is a CREST investigator since 2008-2018, both of which are financially supported by JST. His current research interests include Chemistry under Crude Systems, Chemical Biology and Supramolecular Chemistry.