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Chemistry Seminar Program
Physical Chemistry Seminar Monday, February 4th Professor Haw Yang "The Mechanistic Roles of Conformational Fluctuations in Adenylate Kinase and Single-Particle Tracking Spectroscopy"  4:15pm - 5:15pm Braun Lecture Hall S.G.Mudd Chemistry Building Stanford University This seminar is free and open to the public. All Stanford University Chemistry students are encouraged to attend this special event. About the seminar: It is often posited that conformational changes play an integral role in enzymatic reactivity and protein functions in general. Yet, under physiological conditions, an enzyme is also expected to experience thermal agitations that cause its conformation to fluctuate stochastically. What, then, are the mechanistic roles of the dynamical conformational fluctuations? To address questions of this nature, high-resolution fluorescence single-molecule spectroscopy has been developed, and applied to studying the structural fluctuations of individual adenylate kinase enzymes. By directly following the conformational changes of individual wild-type enzymes and selected mutants, it is shown quantitatively how this enzyme has evolved to utilize thermal fluctuations to efficiently reconfigure its active site in order to achieve a balance between substrate recruitment, catalysis, and product release. Future challenges in our fundamental understanding of biological structure-function dynamics lie in relating such in vitro knowledge to what is really happening in cellular environment. The second part of the presentation describes ideas to address this challenge and their experimental realization—including three-dimensional single-particle tracking spectroscopy and guided confocal microscopy. These new approaches have the potential to directly follow the activities of individual biological macromolecules as they move and function inside a living cell. About Yang: Haw Yang attended National Taiwan University, where he was a Yuan Lee Scholar, and received a Bachelor's degree in Chemistry in 1991. After two years of mandatory military service, he attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked under the supervision of Charles Harris. His Ph.D. thesis concerned the mechanisms and dynamics of photo-induced chemical bond activation by organometallic compounds. In 1999, he went to Harvard University where he worked with Sunney Xie as a postdoctoral research assistant. It was at this time that he first became involved in research related to single-molecule biophysics. In 2002, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, as an Assistant Professor of Chemistry. He is an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, and has received the CAREER award from the National Science Foundation and the Hellman Family Faculty Award. Questions Please contact Patricia Dwyer at 650-723-4770.
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