CBE Seminar: Engineering Viruses, Proteins and Nanoelectronics for Enzymology and Protein Detection

Friday, January 31, 2020 - 11:00 a.m. to Saturday, February 1, 2020 - 11:55 a.m.
Engineering Lecture Hall (ELH) 110
Gregory A. Weiss

Departments of Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Sciences, and Molecular Biology & Biochemistry
UC Irvine

Abstract: The Weiss laboratory invents new chemical tools to interrogate the biological world at the level of atoms and bonds. Many projects in the lab apply phage display to evolve peptides and proteins to bind cancer and diabetes-associated biomarkers. The resultant phage viruses with the disease-specific ligands have been directly wired into electrical circuits for measurement of disease marker levels in urine through collaboration with Reg Penner (UCI). Scaling down to the single molecule level, the lab collaborates with Phil Collins (UCI) to directly wire individual enzymes into carbon nanotube-based electronic circuits, which can record the sound made by the enzymes in motion. Such tools expand what’s possible for dissecting enzymes, in terms of duration of observation (weeks) and time resolution (microseconds), and also disease detection, including low-pM sensitivity with dip-and-read, nearly immediate (10-30 seconds) protein quantitation.

Bio: Gregory Weiss is a professor of chemical biology and Faculty Innovation Fellow at UCI in the Departments of Chemistry, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, and Pharmaceutical Sciences. He earned a bachelor's degree from UC Berkeley and a doctorate from Harvard. His undergraduate and graduate research focused on the development of heterocyclic mimics of peptides. Awarded a Ruth Kirschstein National Research Service Award from the NIH, he returned the funding to pursue postdoctoral studies with Jim Wells, then at Genentech.  In 2000, he joined the faculty at UCI where his laboratory focuses on the interface between chemistry and biology, including studies of enzymes, molecular recognition and bioelectronics. His awards include Outstanding Professor in the School of Physical Sciences at UCI (elected by the graduating students), Beckman Foundation Young Investigator, and election as fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has published around 100 peer-reviewed articles in chemical biology, biophysics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and organic chemistry. He co-founded and then was twice elected co-chair of the Global Young Academy, which includes 200 top young scientists from  more than 55 countries. With David Van Vranken, he co-authored Introduction to Bioorganic Chemistry and Chemical Biology. In 2015, he was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry for leading the team that partially unboiled the egg. He has started two biotech companies (PhageTech and Debut Biotech) and was named UCI’s Entrepreneurial Leader of the Year in 2018. He and his wife, Kim, live in Irvine, California with their five cats. 

Host: Han Li