The next IECB monthly seminar will be held on November 28th at 2:00 PM.

The speaker,  Prof. Martin Huber from Leiden University,  

will present a seminar entitled: "EPR approaches to intrinsically disordered proteins and metal-ion centres related to neurodegenerative disease."

Electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) has been fruitfully applied in areas from physics to biology, and often can address problems other methods cannot tackle. It can be applied to systems that have a paramagnetic centre, either in its native state or after such a centre has been introduced. For biophysical and biochemical problems, details of the electronic structure of active centres, protein structure and dynamics and protein-protein interactions can be obtained.  We will show several examples where EPR has been used to investigate biological questions.

We will show examples where intermediates of amyloid aggregation, a central process in neurodegenerative diseases, were observed by continuous wave EPR in situ during the aggregation process.  We will also investigate native, metal-based, paramagnetic centres that are key for enzymatic activity. Specifically, we show how high-field (95 GHz) EPR provides insights into intermediates of cu(II)-based enzyme reactions. We will then show the example of ferritin, the main iron-storage protein in organisms. Ferritin has an iron-oxide core with approximately 2000 iron atoms, that couple to a very high spin state S, posing challenges to the interpretation of the EPR spectra. We will shoz how we can use EPR to characterize the ferritin-core and understand iron-oxide nano particles that are important in physics and biomedical applications.