The Scripps Research Institute

About Cravatt:
Dr. Cravatt is a Professor in the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology and Chair of the Department of Chemical Physiology at The Scripps Research Institute. His research group is interested in understanding the roles that enzymes play in physiological and pathological processes, especially as pertains to the nervous system and cancer. To address this challenge, they develop and apply an array of biochemical, chemical, and genetic technologies. The Cravatt group has obtained fundamental insights into the chemical, biochemical, and physiological workings of several important mammalian serine hydrolases, including enzymes involved in the neurobiology of pain and in proteases associated with tumor progression.

Dr. Cravatt obtained his undergraduate education at Stanford University, receiving a B.S. in the Biological Sciences and a B.A. in History. He then trained with Drs. Dale Boger and Richard Lerner and received a Ph.D. in Macromolecular and Cellular Structure and Chemistry from The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) in 1996. Professor Cravatt joined the faculty at TSRI in 1997 as a member of the Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology and the departments of Cell Biology and Chemistry. His honors include a Searle Scholar Award (1998-2001), the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry (2004), a Cope Scholar Award (2005), the Irving Sigal Young Investigator Award (2007) and the Tetrahedron Young Investigator Award in Bioorganic and Medicinal Chemistry (2008).

Carvatt's lecture at the Johnson Symposium:
"Activity-based Proteomics and its Application for Enzyme and Inhibitor Discovery"

Genome sequencing projects have revealed that eukaryotic and prokaryotic organisms universally possess a huge number of uncharacterized enzymes. The functional annotation of uncharacterized enzymatic pathways, thus, represents a grand challenge for researchers in the post-genomic era. To address this problem, global molecular profiling methods hold great promise, as they provide a relatively unbiased portrait of the biochemical composition of cells and tissues and can reveal unanticipated alterations in their metabolic and signaling networks. Nonetheless, the identification and functional characterization of enzymatic pathways that support human physiology and pathology have, to date, been hindered by a lack of “systems biology” techniques that can evaluate their activity in complex biological samples. To address this problem, we have introduced functional proteomic and metabolomic technologies that record dynamics in enzyme activity in directly in native biological systems. For example, the activity-based protein profiling (ABPP) technology utilizes active site-directed chemical probes to determine the functional state of large numbers of enzymes in proteomes. In this presentation, I will describe the integrated application of ABPP and complementary functional proteomic/metabolomic methods to discover and functionally annotate enzyme activities in mammalian (patho)physiological processes. I will also present competitive ABPP platforms for developing selective inhibitors for enzymes.


Questions:
If you have questions or need additional information please conteact Patricia Dwyer at 650-723-4770