Mowei Zhou will present a seminar while visiting us from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory next week:
“Deciphering Proteins with Unknown Functions in Plants using Top-Down and Native Mass Spectrometry Techniques”
Tuesday, August 20, 2019
4:00 pm
BRT 105
Mass spectrometry (MS) has been widely used in proteomics applications for identifying and quantifying proteins in biological samples, particularly in the field of biomedical research. In recent years, many new MS techniques, including top-down MS, and native MS for comprehensive characterization of post-translational modification (PTM), ligand/metal binding, higher-order structures, and protein-protein interactions. At the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), a Department of Energy (DOE) user facility located at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), we aim to use advanced analytical tools to build up a mechanistic understanding of biological processes that affect the environment, and to harness enzymes that can produce sustainable “green” fuels from biomass. Despite the fast-expanding knowledge of plant and microbial organisms from genomics and transcriptomics research, many of the genes still have unknown functions and remain to be characterized at the protein level. I will highlight a few recent EMSL projects applying top-down and native MS to uncharacterized proteins. The focus will be on histone modifications in epigenetic control of drought stress in sorghum crop; a plant enzyme heterocomplex in vitamin B6 biosynthesis with tunable stoichiometry; and an unknown plant enzyme complex controlling lignin synthesis.