Seminar:       (349) "Sequence à IDP*or IDR*-Ensemble à Function" Is for Signaling and Regulation

Speaker:       Prof. A. Keith Dunker, Indiana University Schools of Medicine and Informatics, Indianapolis, USA

Time:            2019-04-10 10:00 to 2019-04-10 11:30

Venue:          Meeting room (406), Building 24

Organizer:    SPST

Abstract:

Intrinsically disordered proteinsandregions(IDPsandIDRs) lack well-defined tertiary structures, yet carry out various important cellular functions. They play absolutely key roles in cell signaling, cellular differentiation, translation, transcription and the formation intracellularphase transitions (e.g. formation of membraneless organelles), to name just a few examples. Studies that critically depend on IDPs have received high recognition, including gene regulation (1965 Nobel Prize, Physiology or Medcine), prion disease (1997 Nobel Prize, Physiology or Medicine), induced pluripotent stem cells (2012 Nobel Prize, Physiology or Medicine), autophagy (2016 Nobel prize, Physiology or Medicine), circadian rhythms (2017 Nobel Prize, Physiology or Medicine), and phage display (2018 Nobel Prize, Chemistry), yet the research community andeven the Nobel Laurates are (or were) not aware of the pivotal roles played byIDPsandIDRsin the molecular mechanisms that underlie these phenomena. This stems from the virtually complete lack of coverage ofIDPsandIDRsand their roles in various biological functions in current molecular biology, cell biology, biochemistry, chemical biology and structural biology curricula. This lecture will introduce IDPs and IDRs andillustrate their roles in signaling and regulation.

Brief biography of the speaker:

After receiving his B.S. in Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1965, Dr. Dunker attended the University of Wisconsin at Madison where he earned his M.S. in Physics and his Ph.D. in Biophysics under the direction of Dr. Roland Rueckert. From 1969-1973, he carried out postdoctoral research at Yale University in the laboratory of Donald Marvin where he worked on the structure and cell penetration of the filamentous phage fd. Dr. Dunker started research in computational biology and bioinformatics in the mid-1980s and began using bioinformatics to study intrinsically disordered roteins in the mid-1990s, where he and his collaborators were the first to consider these proteins as a distinct class with important biological functions. His bioinformatics research goals over the next several years include the improvement of intrinsic disorder predictions, especially with respect to identifying different types of disorder (flavors) and then to understanding the relationships between the different types of disorder and protein function,i.e., to understand flavor-function relationships. In addition, he wants tocombine bioinformatics prediction with laboratory experimentation to develop new approaches for understanding protein-protein and protein-nucleic acid signaling interactions that involve intrinsically disordered proteins. Ongoing work suggests that the original proteins on earth were intrincically disordered and that protein evolution followed a disorder to order pathway. Laboratoryexperiements to test the disorder to order pathway for protein evolution will be getting underway.