Structural Characterization of σ54 Core-Binding Domain Truncation

During the summer of 2012, I participated in the AMGEN Scholars Program. Although I stayed at UC Berkeley in the same lab I had written my honors undergraduate thesis in, I worked on a slightly different project. For the 10-week duration of the program, I worked on creating a variant of the Core-Binding Domain of σ54 that lacked the C-terminal helix. Though this construct will be used in future molecular tweezers experiments, I first used NMR spectroscopy to characterize its structure and compare it to the wild-type domain. This analysis found that the truncation did not affect the secondary and tertiary structure of the rest of the domain and as a result, future molecular tweezers experiments with the truncated construct are plausible.

In addition to my lab work, I attended the AMGEN Symposium at UCLA, gave an oral presentation about my research, and presented a poster at the UC Berkeley AMGEN poster session. For more information about this project, please see my abstract and poster.