Zhaohui (Sunny) Zhou

Professor, Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Northeastern University

Speaker

My laboratory, aka SunnyLand, applies protein chemistry, analysis and engineering to biology and medicine. One program is “Hybrid Modality Engineering of Proteins”—a platform to introduce non-canonical chemical moieties and/or scaffolds into peptides and proteins to confer novel functions (mode of action) otherwise unavailable via recombinant technology. One application is the conditional release and activation of therapeutics (e.g., prodrugs), such as by light (photomedicine). The second is to devise chemo-enzymatic methodologies to characterize protein modifications (PTMs), such as crosslinking, isoaspartic acid formation (asparagine deamidation), S-adenosyl-methionine (AdoMet or SAM)-dependent methylations, and moreover, unknown PTMs and analytical artifacts. In collaboration with biologists and clinicians alike, we also investigate their biological effects, and moreover, as critical attributes in protein pharmaceuticals. A third program area is the mechanistic studies of and inhibitor design for enzymes with intriguing mechanisms and biomedical significance.