Chemistry Colloquium, Presented by Prof. Akif Tezcan, University of California San Diego
Chemical Design of Functional Protein Materials
Proteins represent the most versatile building blocks available to living organisms or the laboratory scientist for constructing functional materials and molecular devices. Underlying this versatility is an immense structural and chemical heterogeneity that renders the programmable self-assembly of proteins an extremely challenging design task. To circumvent the challenge of designing extensive non-covalent interfaces for controlling protein self-assembly, our group has endeavored to use chemical bonding strategies based on fundamental principles of inorganic chemistry and molecular symmetry. These strategies (combined with some supramolecular and polymer chemistry) have resulted in discrete or infinite, 0-, 1-, 2- and 3D protein architectures that display high structural order over large length scales, yet are dynamic, adaptive and possess new emergent chemical/physical properties. In this talk, I will present some of these functional protein-based materials constructed in our laboratory.
Read more about the Tezcan Research Group here
About Prof. Tezcan: Akif Tezcan is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry and a member of the Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) Program and the Institute of Materials Discovery and Design at UCSD. He was educated at the German High School in Istanbul, Macalester College in St. Paul, MN (BA in Chemistry and Biology) and Caltech in Pasadena, CA, USA (PhD in Bioinorganic Chemistry with Harry Gray), followed by postdoctoral research at Caltech as a Helen Hay Whitney fellow (with Doug Rees). His research program at UCSD, started in 2005, focuses on developing new chemical tools and strategies to study biological nitrogen fixation, to design functional proteins and enzymes, and to create new protein-based materials. Akif and his group’s research program at UCSD has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, Sloan Fellowship, Beckman Young Investigator Award, Frasch Foundation Award, Moore Distinguished Scholarship, the Early Career Award from the Society of Biological Inorganic Chemistry, Guggenheim Fellowship, and the ACS Alfred Bader Award in Bioinorganic Chemistry.
