The Fordyce Lab has been awarded seed funding from Bio-X to support two projects in the lab!
The first grant, "High-throughput Quantitative Enzymology: Developing and Deploying a Novel Microfluidic Platform", funds a collaborative project with Dan Herschlag's lab in the Department of Biochemistry that is being driven by Craig Markin, a joint postdoc between our labs. The goal of this project is to develop a new microfluidic technology for producing and measuring Michaelis-Menten kinetics for thousands of rationally chosen enzyme mutants in parallel. By making these measurements, we hope to learn more about how enzymes position active site residues for catalysis and improve efforts to design new enzymes.
The second grant, "Deciphering the Language of Cellular Protein Interaction Networks Using Spectrally Encoded Peptide-Bead Libraries", funds a collaborative project with Martha Cyert's lab in the Department of Biology that is being led by Huy Nguyen. For this project, we are developing a new bead-based technology for studying how calcineurin, a human phosphatase that is the target of several immunosuppressant drugs, finds and binds its protein substrates in the cell. With these measurements, we hope to improve prediction of calcineurin substrates and deepen our knowledge of cell signaling networks in vivo.
For more information on these projects (and to see the awesome science of the other funded grants!), check out the Bio-X website.