Graduate students in Biochemistry and Chemical Biology meld molecular and structural biology with physical, organic and analytical chemistry to understand the molecular basis of life. Research in the Biochemistry and Chemical Biology Division focuses on protein, membrane, DNA, RNA and virus function and structure.
Students are a constant source of new hypotheses for mechanisms underlying cellular machines like the ribosome and spliceosome, and for the protein and RNA folding problems. Students tackle these problems using chemical biosensor technologies, protein and nucleic acid crystallography, multi-dimensional NMR spectroscopy, surface chemistry, atomic force microscopy and fluorescence spectroscopy.
Our work also includes major efforts directed towards understanding the molecular basis of disease. Doctoral students leave the Department broadly trained for leadership roles in academia and industry.
All interested students are strongly encouraged to apply via the BBSP program.
Putting bacteria on birth control could stop the spread of drug-resistant microbes, and researchers at Carolina Chemistry have found a way to do just that.
"Our discoveries may lead to the ability to selectively kill antibiotic-resistant bacteria in patients, and to halt the spread of resistance in clinical settings," said Matt Redinbo, Ph.D., senior study author and professor of chemistry, biochemistry and biophysics at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Antibiotic resistance propagates in bacteria by moving DNA strands containing the resistance genes to neighboring cells. An enzyme called relaxase is essential for this process. Bisphosphonates, already approved to treat bone loss, have now been shown to potently disrupt the relaxase function. Some bisphosphonates prevent the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes and selectively kill bacterial cells that harbor resistance.
In work published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the Waters group has demonstrated the critical role of cation-pi interactions in providing specificity to the interaction of Histone 3A with the HP1 Chromodomain.
Substitution of the trimethylamonium group of trimethyllysine in Histone 3A with a neutral tert-butyl analog abolishes binding despite the equivalent size and shape, indicating the importance of the cation-pi interaction over hydrophobicity. These results provide insight into the role of lysine methylation as part of the histone code for controlling gene expression.
Students in the Weeks Laboratory have pioneered RNA SHAPE chemistry, which allows local nucleotide flexibility to be quantitatively assessed for RNA molecules of arbitrary size and complexity at single nucleotide resolution.
"In one advance, Stefanie Mortimer has developed several fast acting, second generation, reagents for RNA SHAPE chemistry. For example, 1-methyl-7-nitroisatoic anhydride (1M7) allows the secondary and tertiary structure at all nucleotides in an RNA to be interrogated in 70 seconds, as described recenlty in JACS. Experimentally-assisted RNA structure prediction using 1M7 is typically 90% accurate or better.