
Imaging and Treatment for Neurodegenerative Disease
Monday, April 3, 2006
Organizers: Young-Tae Chang and Paramjit Arora, New York University
Recent years have seen increasing dialogue between chemists and biologists, the lines of communication consolidated by the availability of recombinant biotechnology tools for manipulating the chemical structure of genes and the proteins they encode. This has led to an explosion of interdisciplinary activity at the chemistry/biology interface, now coined chemical biology. Meetings of this group provides a forum for lively discussion and for establishing connections, and perhaps collaborations, between chemists armed with novel technologies and biologists receptive to using these approaches to solve their chosen biological problem.
Program
Peter Lansbury, Harvard Medical School, "New Therapeutic Strategies for the Treatment of Parkinson's Disease."
Alice Ting, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Fluorescent Reporters of Protein Trafficking and Function in Living Cells."
Abstracts
"New Therapeutic Strategies for the Treatment of Parkinson's Disease"
Peter Lansbury
Parkinson's disease (PD) effects nearly one million Americans and its cost to Medicaire has been estimated to be $25B annually. Yet there are no disease-modifying drugs on the market and very few in development. This talk will discuss the reasons for the pharmaceutical industry's avoidance of PD and efforts in my laboratory to get the ball rolling. Three therapeutic strategies will be detailed, one arising from biohysical studies of the folding of a-synuclein, one arising from cell biological and biochemical studies of UCH-L1, a gene product linked to PD susceptibilitiy, and a third strategy based on screening of compounds in a Parkinsonian drosophila.
"Fluorescent Reporters of Protein Trafficking and Function in Living Cells"
Alice Ting
We will describe new methodology for protein labeling, detecting protein-protein interactions, and measuring enzyme activity non-invasively in living cells. Specific topics include: single-molecule imaging of AMPA-type glutamate receptors, targeting of quantum dots, protein labeling with biotin ligase, and streptavidin engineering.