Physical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Galia Debelouchina, UC San Diego
Physical Chemistry Seminar: Professor Galia Debelouchina, UC San Diego (Host: Lynette Cegelski)
**This seminar is available for in-person attendance.**
"NMR-Based Tools for Structural Biology of Complex Systems: From Gels to Cells"
About the Seminar
Recent advances in structural biology have dramatically expanded the scope of proteins and assemblies that are now amenable to structural analysis. Yet, many biological systems display dynamics and undergo transformations that have been difficult to capture experimentally, especially in complex or native settings. In this context, my group has been developing NMR-based methodologies to describe such challenging systems and to pave the way to the next exciting structural biology frontier, the cellular environment. Here, I will present our progress on two fronts: 1) Development of NMR methodologies to describe the molecular basis of protein phase transitions from the liquid to the gel and solid states. In particular, I will focus on the transitions displayed by heterochromatin protein 1α (HP1α), a key player in gene regulation and chromatin organization. 2) Development of sensitivity-enhanced NMR approaches suitable for the cellular environment. Our work is based on a methodology called dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) which can transfer polarization from electron to nuclear spins and thus increase nuclear signals by several orders of magnitude. For this purpose, we develop small molecule DNP polarization agents that contain unpaired electron spins and that can be targeted selectively to a protein of interest. These agents have allowed us to obtain NMR structural data of tiny amounts of proteins (1-5 μg) and to study the polarization transfer mechanisms in targeted DNP experiments.
About the Speaker
Galia Debelouchina received her Ph.D. in the group of Prof. Robert Griffin at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she developed dynamic nuclear polarization approaches to study the structure of amyloid fibrils. After the completion of her Ph.D., she joined the lab of Prof. Tom Muir at Princeton University where she studied chromatin structure and dynamics using NMR spectroscopy and other biophysical and chemical biology tools. She joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at UCSD as an Assistant Professor in July 2017. Her group combines NMR spectroscopy, cell biology and chemical biology approaches to study protein phase separation in the context of neurodegenerative disease and gene regulation, and to develop sensitivity enhanced NMR spectroscopy for structural biology in cells. Galia was the recipient of the Raymond Andrew Prize for an outstanding PhD thesis in magnetic resonance in 2012, the American Chemical Society Salute to Excellence Award in 2016, the UCSD Hellman Fellowship in 2020, and the Lattimer Fellowship in 2022.
Image Credit: Michelle Fredricks, Division of Physical Sciences, UCSD