Amy Palmer, Professor, Dept of Biochemistry, University of Colorado Boulder, will give a talk on "Illuminating the biochemistry of zinc and RNA in living cells."

ABSTRACT

The Palmer lab develops fluorescent tools to illuminate the biochemistry of living cells, specifically the roles of metal ions such as zinc and biomolecules such as RNA. There are over two thousand proteins encoded by the human genome that are predicted to bind zinc, where zinc binding is essential for function.  Given the importance of Zn²⁺ in cell biology and human health, it is astounding that we still don’t understand the mechanisms of how Zn²⁺ levels and dynamics impact basic cellular functions and give rise to disease.  This talk will focus on our discoveries that Zn²⁺ dynamics influence fundamental cellular processes such as gene expression, interactions between transcription factors and chromatin at the single molecule level, and the proliferation-quiescence decision in the mammalian cell cycle.  I will also discuss our ongoing efforts to develop a fluorescent tool for illuminating RNA called Riboglow.  Recently, we developed a new platform for tagging mRNA and ncRNA with fluorophores to track them in live cells.  This highly modular ‘Riboglow’ platform leverages different color fluorescent dyes, linkers and riboswitch RNA tags to elicit fluorescent turn-on upon binding RNA.