Abstract

Our research uses chemistry principles to address questions of importance in life sciences and molecular medicine. This lecture will cover recent examples of emerging areas in our group in:

1. methods for site-selective chemical modification of proteins and antibodies;
2. bioorthogonal cleavage reactions for targeted drug activation in cells;
3. click-degraders, small molecules that when in proximity can degrade RNA, akin to ribonucleases. Using click-degraders we developed 1) meCLICK-Seq, a powerful method for the study of diverse aspects of cellular RNA methylation, and 2) proximity-driven small molecule RNA degraders to target and degrade SARS-CoV-2 genomes and exert an antiviral effect in disease models.