Professor Scott K. Silverman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“DNA as a Catalyst”

About the Seminar:

Small-molecule catalysts and protein enzymes are both broadly useful, but for certain applications neither type of catalyst can readily be employed. In this presentation, I describe our development of single-stranded DNA as a catalyst. Nature uses RNA as a catalyst (ribozyme) for a small number of reactions. In the laboratory, we use in vitro selection to identify specific sequences of DNA that have catalytic activity, much like protein enzymes are particular catalytic amino acid sequences. Unlike for protein enzymes, we can identify DNA catalysts, or deoxyribozymes, for a variety of chemical reactions by starting from entirely unbiased (random) sequence populations and implementing an appropriately designed in vitro selection strategy. Our efforts primarily focus on DNA-catalyzed protein modification reactions, such as phosphorylation, dephosphorylation, glycosylation, and peptide bond hydrolysis. Please see http://www.scs.illinois.edu/silverman/ andhttp://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.accounts.5b00090 for more information on our research with DNA as a catalyst.

About the Speaker:

Scott K. Silverman was born in 1972 and raised in Los Angeles, California. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry from UCLA in 1991, working with Christopher Foote on photooxygenation mechanisms. He was an NSF and ACS Organic Chemistry predoctoral fellow with Dennis Dougherty at Caltech, studying high-spin organic polyradicals and molecular neurobiology and graduating with a Ph.D. in chemistry in 1997. After postdoctoral research on RNA biochemistry as a Helen Hay Whitney Foundation and American Cancer Society fellow with Thomas Cech at the University of Colorado at Boulder, he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2000, where he is currently Professor of Chemistry. His laboratory studies DNA as a catalyst.