报告题目：Biochemical and Physico-chemical Properties of Guanine-Rich DNA

报告人：Dr. Robert Macgregor

主持人：医学研究院 王茜院长

报告时间：2019年11月6日（星期三）下午3:00

报告地点：友谊校区老图书馆401会议室

报告摘要：Among the bases of the nucleic acids, guanine has unique capability to form self-complementary complexes consisting of four mutually hydrogen bonded guanines or G-tetrads. G-tetrads can stabilize the formation of four-stranded nucleic acid structures called G-quadruplexes. These structures have become of great interest to biologists, biochemists, and materials scientists. In biology, guanines are over-represented in two places in the genome: at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes and in promotor sequences. There is a great deal of interest in the possibility that four-stranded DNA (and RNA) plays a role in the regulation of protein synthesis and cell death.

Dr. Macgregor will present some of his lab’s work aimed at understanding the forces that stabilize G-quadruplexes. We use spectroscopy and hydrostatic pressure to gain insight into the interactions of these structures with water and ligands.

报告人简介：

Dr. Robert Macgregor was born and raised in Detroit. He received a B.Sc degree from Michigan State University. For PhD studies, he attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and completed his research in the lab of Gregorio Weber, where he studied solvation of small molecules using fluorescence spectroscopy. Upon graduating, he did a post-doc at the Max-Planck-Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Goettingen, Germany, where he used relaxation kinetics to investigate ligand-DNA interactions.

As a principal investigator, his research focusses on the role of solvation in the stability and interactions of DNA, the use of hydrostatic pressure as a sterilization method, and the understanding the forces that stabilize unusual nucleic acid structures. He worked at Bell Laboratories, the College of Pharmacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has been working at the Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy at the University of Toronto for 26 years.

At UofT, Dr. Macgregor founded and was the director of the undergraduate pharmaceutical chemistry program for 15 years. He has served as the Associate Dean in Research, and am currently the chair of the Graduate Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences.