Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Jeremy Baskin, Cornell University

Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Jeremy Baskin, Cornell University
Date
Wed May 19th 2021, 4:00 - 5:00pm
Location
Zoom

Organic Chemistry Seminar: Professor Jeremy Baskin, Cornell University (Host: Carolyn Bertozzi)

About the Seminar

"Chemical Tools that IMPACT Lipid Signaling"

The fidelity of intracellular signaling pathways requires that cells control the production of signaling agents in space and in time. Phosphatidic acid (PA) is both a central phospholipid biosynthetic intermediate and a multifunctional lipid second messenger produced at several discrete subcellular locations. The modes of action of PA can differ based on upstream stimulus, biosynthetic source, and site of production. How cells regulate the local production of PA to direct diverse signaling outcomes remains elusive. To begin to unravel these questions, we have focused our efforts on improving and expanding the toolkit for both visualizing and perturbing cellular PA production, with spatiotemporal precision. Toward the first goal, we have harnessed the exquisite selectivity of chemoenzymatic labeling and click chemistry tagging to develop a method for directly visualizing PA production by phospholipase D (PLD) enzymes. This method, termed IMPACT for Imaging PLD Activity with Clickable Alcohols via Transphosphatidylation, has revealed sites of PLD-mediated PA signaling elicited by diverse physiological stimuli and features subcellular, organelle-level resolution. To complement these tools for visualizing PA production, we have also generated a suite of light-controllable, optogenetic PLDs (optoPLDs) to precisely generate tunable amounts of PA, on demand, at specific organelle membranes. We will also describe select applications of IMPACT and optoPLD to, respectively, visualize and control the locations and dynamics of important cellular pathways that intersect with PLD signaling, including GPCR activation and the Hippo pathway. Collectively, these new approaches represent powerful and precise approaches for revealing spatiotemporally defined functions of PA in response to physiological and pathological stimuli. More broadly, our work highlights the power of combining bioorthogonal chemistries, chemoenzymatic tagging, directed evolution, and optogenetics to shed light on cell signaling pathways.

About the Speaker

Jeremy M. Baskin was born and raised in Montreal, Canada. He received his undergraduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a major in Chemistry and minors in Biology and Music. At MIT, he performed organic chemistry research in Stephen Buchwald’s group and chemical biology research in Alice Ting’s lab. He carried out Ph.D. studies supported by NDSEG and NSF graduate fellowships in Carolyn Bertozzi’s group at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on development of bioorthogonal chemistries. Jeremy received postdoctoral training in cell biology as a Jane Coffin Childs fellow at Yale University with Pietro De Camilli. Since 2015, he has been Assistant Professor and Nancy and Peter Meinig Family Investigator in the Life Sciences at Cornell University, with appointments in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology and the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology. Research in the Baskin laboratory centers on the chemical biology and cell biology of phospholipid signaling, with a focus both on development of tools for visualizing and manipulating phosphatidic acid signaling and elucidation of mechanisms connecting phosphatidic acid and phosphoinositide metabolism to physiological and pathological signaling events. Jeremy is recipient of numerous awards, including Beckman Young Investigator, Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER, ACS Young Academic Investigator, and ASBMB Walter A. Shaw Young Investigator in Lipid Research.

Photo courtesy of Dave Burbank.