This CIP@Cornell seminar will feature a presentation by Jacob Geri (Assistant Professor in the Weill Cornell Medicine Department of Pharmacology) entitled “Photocatalytic Proximity Labeling.” Join the CIP community for breakfast at 9am before the Dr Geri's presentation at 9:30!

Abstract: "Interactions between proteins and other molecules are central to the architecture of life, and a lack of effective technologies for mapping these interactions is a major bottleneck in identifying actionable therapeutic targets. Widely used approaches for protein-protein interaction discovery suffer from a high rate of false positives (enzymatic proximity labeling) and false negatives (coIP-MS, crosslink-MS), while small molecule target-ID with photoaffinity labeling demands extensive empirical optimization of probe design. Photocatalytic proximity labeling, in which an iridium based photocatalyst generates reactive carbene-biotin conjugates via Dexter energy transfer, bypasses these limitations by affording high resolution (<4 nm) labeling of nearby biomolecules. Any targeting modality can be used to localize the photocatalyst, including small molecules, peptides, proteins, and antibodies, and the flexibility of the photocatalytic platform allows a user to dial in a desired labeling radius from nanometer to micrometer distance scales. The Geri lab at Weill Cornell Medicine focuses on the further development of µMap technology and its application towards currently inaccessible biological spaces, including single-cell interactomics, high throughput small molecule target identification, and expanding the activity based protein profiling concept beyond irreversibly reactive warheads."