CaSTL Seminar Speaker Series and the Center for Chemical Innovation presents: Christy Landes | Professor of Chemistry and Electrical & Computer Engineering - Rice University

Title: Single protein dynamics at soft interfaces: Can physical chemistry solve a $100,000,000,000 problem?

BIO: Christy F. Landes is a Professor in the Departments of Chemistry, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Rice University in Houston, TX. After graduating from George Mason University in 1998, she completed a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2003 under the direction of National Academy member Prof. Mostafa El-Sayed. She was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oregon and an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, under the direction of National Academy members Prof. Geraldine Richmond and Prof. Paul Barbara, respectively, before joining the University of Houston as an assistant professor in 2006. She moved to her current position at Rice in 2009, earning an NSF CAREER award for her tenure-track work in 2011 and the ACS Early Career Award in Experimental Physical Chemistry in 2016. The Landes group is comprised of chemists, applied physicists, and electrical engineers. The group develops next-generation tools to image dynamics at soft interfaces at the limit of a single event, and uses this super-resolved chemical knowledge to create new models for how to control macroscale processes such as protein separations and photocatalysis.

ABSTRACT: Recent efforts by Prof. Landes group and others have shown the promise of applying single molecule methods to link mechanistic detail about protein adsorption to macroscale observables. When we study one molecule at a time, we eliminate ensemble averaging, thereby accessing any underlying complexity. However, we must develop new methods to increase information content in the resulting low density and low signal-to-noise data and to improve space and time resolution. Prof. Landes will highlight recent advances in super-resolution microscopy for quantifying the physics and chemistry that occur between target proteins and stationary phase supports during chromatographic separations. Her discussion will concentrate on the newfound ability of super-resolved single protein spectroscopy to inform theoretical parameters via quantification of adsorption-desorption dynamics, protein unfolding, and nano confined transport.