Date: Friday, 30th January at 12:00
Venue: Aula A2 (floor 1, building A), Faculty of Pharmacy, Universitat de Barcelona
Invited speaker: Professor Ivan Huc, Faculty of Chemistry and Pharmacy, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany.
Title: Protein mimicry and recognition with synthetic foldamers
Abstract:
Aromatic oligomers constitute a distinct and promising class of synthetic foldamers – oligomers that adopt stable folded conformations. Single helical structures are, to a large extent, predictable, show unprecedented conformational stability in essentially all solvents, and represent convenient building blocks to elaborate synthetic, very large (protein-sized) folded architectures. Solution phase synthesis gives access to aromatic amino acid monomers bearing all kinds of biogenic-like side chains, and solid phase synthesis of long oligomers has been automated. In some instances, protein-sized foldamers can even self-synthesized, that is, spontaneously emerge from their precursor monomer.
This lecture will highlight how these sizeable folded molecules can be designed and used to recognize proteins, a challenge that can be addressed through different approaches, i.e. biomimicry, screening or computational design and combinations thereof.
