Organic Chemistry Seminar

Chemical probes offer a valuable way to directly interrogate the function and disease-relevance of proteins and can also serve as valuable leads for drug development, yet most proteins in the human proteome lack small-molecule ligands that can serve as probes. More generally, the boundaries, if any, on the ligandability, and therefore potential druggability, across native proteomes remains poorly understood. In this seminar, I will describe our lab's efforts to develop powerful photoaffinity-based chemical proteomic strategies to broadly map ligandable proteins directly in cells, and how this information can be advanced into useful chemical probes for targets that play critical roles in human health and disease.