Overview

Chemical biology encompasses a highly diverse array of experimental approaches, and this diversity was quite well represented at a meeting on May 31, 2006, at the Academy. Keynote speaker James Rothman of Columbia University described his work on vesicle fusion in eukaryotic cells, a process that is critical for functions as diverse as insulin release and synaptic transmission.

Qunzhao Wang (Albert Einstein College of Medicine) spoke about the engineered peptides he has developed that can act as fluorescent reporters of protein kinase activity for intracellular signaling studies. Ross Chapman (NYU) described the synthesis of conformationally stabilized peptides that can retain their biological activity even when removed from the context of a full protein. Justin Potuzak (Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) presented his work on the synthesis of spiroketals. And Edmund Schwartz (The Rockefeller University) showed how conditional splicing may be used to gain the precise temporal control of protein activity that is needed for some types of studies.