Thomas Hermann | University of California
Event Date:
April 21, 2016 – 3:30 PM
Location:
Burson 115
Event Date:
April 21, 2016 – 3:30 PM
Location:
Burson 115
Ph.D Nanoscale Science Seminar Series | Spring 2016
Thomas Hermann
University of California, San Diego
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
“Crystal Structure-Guided Design of RNA Nanoarchitectures”
Abstract:
RNA nanotechnology harnesses RNA structural motifs to build nano-sized architectures which assemble through selective base pair interactions. While RNA nanoarchitectures have previously been constructed from structurally complex motifs or long nucleic acid sequences, our goal is to create minimalist objects by efficient assembly of short sequences which by themselves do not adopt stable structures. We harnessed detailed structural insight from X-ray crystallography of ncRNA motifs to design and construct different nano-objects, including self-assembling squares and triangles. These structures are the yet smallest circularly closed nano-objects made entirely of double-stranded RNA. The assemblies offer unique structural features that promise applications in medicine, nanomaterials engineering, and as tools to test nano-scale phenomena.
Bio:
Thomas Hermann performed undergraduate studies in Germany and thesis research at the Max-Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried. He received a Ph.D. from the Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich in 1996. As a postdoc, he worked with Prof. Eric Westhof at the CNRS in Strasbourg, France, and with Prof. Dinshaw Patel at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Subsequently, he was among the first employees of Anadys Pharmaceuticals in San Diego in 2001, where he built the structural chemistry group and led discovery teams working on ribosome-targeted antibiotics and HCV polymerase inhibitors, laying the foundation for the development of setrobuvir. In 2005, he joined UC San Diego where he currently is an Associate Professor and serves as a founding director of the Center for Drug Discovery Innovation. His research at UC San Diego is focused on the 1) discovery and characterization of potential drug targets in noncoding RNA, 2) the design and synthesis of RNA-targeted small molecules, and 3) the structure-based design of self-assembling RNA nano-architectures.