2007 Summer Seminar Series
The Student Summer Seminar Series is a great opportunity for students to gain experience in research presentations, as well as to gain useful feedback from fellow students in a more informal atmosphere, without the added pressure of presenting in front of faculty. Moreover, it's a chance to learn about some of the (awesome) research that goes on within the department.

Date	Speaker/Group
Thursday, June 21st	Cheyenne Brindle (Trost Group -4th Year) Aaron Fafarman (Boxer Group - 4th Year)
Thursday, July 12th	Ilya Shestopalov(Chen Group- 3rd Year) Dan Ensign (Pande Group- 2nd Year)
Thursday, August 2nd	Maria Montero Diez (Gratta Group -2nd Year) Steve Tse (Andersen Group - 1st Year)
Thursday, August 16th	Chris Caires (Guccione Group - 4th Year Group) Zhuang Liu (Dai Group - 3rd Year)

Additional information on the seminars:

Thursday, June 21st
Speaker 1 – Cheyenne Brindle – 4th year – Trost group
“Progress Toward the Total Synthesis of Leustroducsin B”
A concise approach to the construction of the colony stimulating factor inducer, leustroducsin B, will be presented, featuring a number of powerful key steps. These include a direct catalytic asymmetric aldol reaction, a palladium asymmetric allylic alkylation, and a Hiyama cross-coupling.

Speaker 2 - Aaron Fafarman – 4th year – Boxer Group
“Measuring Electrostatic Fields in Proteins Using Thiocyanate Stark Probes”
Charged residues and permanent dipoles inherent to the polypeptide chain result in organized and locally very strong electrostatic fields in folded proteins. These fields, hypothesized in many cases to be on the order of 1-10 MV/cm, are expected to play very important roles in catalysis, molecular recognition and charge transfer. We propose here a general method for the quantitative measurement of these fields, allowing for the contribution of electrostatics to the above processes to be parsed independently. A mild, cysteine-selective labeling chemistry is used to introduce a nitrile into intact proteins, in the form of a thiocyanate moiety. Vibrational Stark measurements are used to calibrate the thiocyanate's response to electric fields (it's so-called "tuning rate") and with that value in hand, a simple FT-IR measurement yields a quantitative measure of the local electrostatic field.

Thursday, July 12th
Speaker 1 - Ilya Shestopalov – 3rd year – James Chen Group (Department of Systems Biology)
“Light-controlled gene silencing in zebrafish embryos”
--- The synthesis of caged gene-inactivating molecules and how the can be directed with light to turn of any gene in any cell and at any time in a living zebrafish embryos.

Speaker 2 - Dan Ensign – 2nd year – Pande group
“Large-Scale Molecular Dynamics Study of a Fast-Folding Variant of the Villin Headpiece.”
--- This talk will focus on molecular dynamics (MD) simulations of the fastest-folding protein yet discovered, a variant of the villin headpiece known as HP-35 NleNle. The simulations were generated using a new distributed computing method utilizing the symmetric multiprocessing paradigm for individual nodes of the Folding@home distributed computing network. This technology has enabled the generation of hundreds of MD trajectories each on a timescale comparable to the experimental folding time. Despite the fast relaxation to the folded state, this protein exhibits complex dynamics--the path to the folded state and its rate are dependent upon the starting configurations.

Thursday, August 2nd
Speaker 1 - Maria Montero Diez – 2nd year – Giorgio Gratta group (Physics Department)
“The Enriched Xenon Observatory for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay”
Neutrino oscillations indicate that neutrinos are in fact massive. The exact masses of the neutrinos remain unknown, and this is one of the most important questions in particle physics today. The Enriched Xenon Observatory (EXO) is set up to determine neutrino masses via a rare nuclear process known as neutrinoless double beta decay. In this talk I will discuss the use of enriched xenon as both a source and a detector of double beta decay, as well as tagging of the barium daughter as a background reduction method.

Speaker 2 - Steve Tse – 1st year – Andersen Group
"One-dimensional and Three-dimensional Interacting Random Walk Models"
Random walk models play an important role both in chemistry and physics. In particular, one might use a random walk model to study the caging effect of the particles of a liquid. Understanding the caging phenomenon might lead to an answer to explain the high viscosity in supercooled liquids. In this talk, I will first present some basic ideas of random walks and I will talk about some of the qualitative aspects and results of one-dimensional and three-dimensional interacting random walk models.

Thursday, August 16th
Speaker 1 - Chris Caires – 4th year – Guccione Group
“Organobismuth compounds as aqueous fluoride chelators. Progress towards new 18F probes for PET imaging.”
Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is a desirable method of imaging due to its extremely high sensitivity and good resolution. Of the common radioactive isotopes used in PET (11C, 13O, 13N, 18F), fluorine-18 is highly desirable due to its favorable half life of 110 minutes, high rate of positron emission decay (97%), and low relative energy. Nearly all fluorine-18 based radiolabeling methods rely on nucleophilic displacement at a carbon bearing a tosylate or triflate, with anionic fluoride under anhydrous conditions and high temperatures. While these harsh conditions may be suitable for labeling small molecules, they are not suitable for labeling sensitive molecules like proteins or antibodies. We present our work thus far on a class of organobismuth compounds that show high affinity for fluoride under aqueous conditions. We propose that these compounds could be used as fluoride chelators tethered to biomolecules to facilitate 18F labeling and in vivo imaging.

Speaker 2 – Zhuang Liu – 3rd year – Dai Group
“Biomedical application of single-walled carbon nanotubes, from in vitro to in vivo”
The biological applications of carbon nanotubes have been attracting a lot of attentions recently. The research in our lab in the past few years shows that single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are able to deliver many biological molecules including protein, DNA and small interfering RNA (siRNA) into cells in vitro via endocytosis pathway. The molecular delivery ability of SWNTs is general to various types of cells including those hard-to-transfect T cells. Supramolecular chemistry approach can be applied to pre-functionalized SWNTs to afford ultra-high drug loading on these SWNTs for the delivery of chemotherapy drugs. In vivo biodistribution and tumor targeting studies have been performed with radio-labeled SWNTs. The efficient tumor targeting ability of our modified SWNTs is very promising for cancer therapy applications. Moreover, we have studied the long-term biodistribution of SWNTs in mice by ex-vivo Raman spectroscopy method and found that the blood circulation and body excretion behaviors of SWNTs are highly dependent on their surface coating. No obvious toxic effect is seen in mice injected with SWNTs up to six months. Taken together, our research shows a great promise for the future cancer therapy application of carbon nanotubes.

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