Georgetown’s Chemistry Department in the News
Two Georgetown Chemistry professors have had notable recent successes.
Prof. Rodrigo Maillard has been awarded a 3-year $450,000 NIH R15 grant to pursue work on “Hierarchical Allosteric Regulation Mechanisms in Protein Kinases”. And his lab has published a key paper on this topic in Nature Communications,led by graduate student Dr. Yuxin Hao who recently defended her PhD and will soon head to Harvard for a postdoc.
Protein Kinase A is a signaling protein that enables timely cellular adaptations to changes in the extracellular environment like nutrient depletion, hormone activation, among others. Mutations that disrupt the activity of PKA are associated with many human diseases. Not known, however, is the relationship between the location of the mutations in the PKA structure and the disease phenotype. In this grant, his lab will use biophysical and biochemical approaches to understand how mutations clustered in different domains of PKA, which lead to two different diseases named Carney Complex disease and Acrodysostosis, affect protein activity and regulation.
Congratulations to Yuxin, Rodrigo, and the team.
Prof. Kaveh Jorabchi just won a $1.1m NIH R01 award for a proposed 4-year project on “Next Generation Elemental Mass Spectrometry of Non-Metals”. Kaveh’s lab will develop new techniques for measuring the exact amount of molecules in biological samples to characterize how molecules such as drugs and environmental contaminants are metabolized in the body.
