Organic Chemistry Seminar

This is a Hybrid event.

Alterations in proteostasis are known contributors to various maladies including cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Chemical biology has brought to proteostasis an appreciation that goes beyond biogenesis, folding, trafficking, and degradation of proteins, to incorporate the study of the interaction fate of proteins, especially as they occur in disease processes at the proteome-wide level. This has been enabled by the discovery of epichaperomes, long-lived assemblies and disease-associated pathologic scaffolds composed of tightly bound chaperones, co-chaperones, and other factors, and catalyzed by generation and implementation of several chemical probes, from epichaperome disrupters to epichaperome affinity-purification tools and epichaperome detection and quantitation probes. I will highlight the knowledge gained to date through chemical biology on the deleterious effect epichaperomes have on reshaping protein-protein interaction networks (i.e., interactomes) in disease, especially in cancer and neurodegenerative diseases. I will also discuss the restorative effects of epichaperome disrupters through rebalancing proteome-wide interactome defects. Lastly, I will highlight how through the use of chemical probes to enable epichaperome detection and quantitation, the discipline of chemical biology has provided opportunities for precision medicine in cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.