The Chaput lab would like to congratulate our very own undergraduate, Chantel Nguyen Tran for her award of the UCI Allergan Summer Undergraduate Research Program (UROP) fellowship for summer 2017! Her proposed research project is structural studies that probe the mechanism of unnatural nucleotide replication in engineered DNA polymerases, in which she will be working closely and under the guidance of Nicholas Chim, Facilities Manager in the Chaput Lab.

During this summer fellowship, we know that Chantel will be working hard and greatly help the Chaput lab look further into TNA polymerases and their activity. We also look forward to seeing her research results and findings be formally presented at the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium in May 2018.

 

 

Congratulations to Miramar for presenting her research results and findings formally presented at the UCI Undergraduate Research Symposium on Saturday, May 20, 2017. During her fellowship, Miramar looked at the crystallization of KOD, a XNA polymerase in the lab, with a fluorescent base of threose sugar. We thank Miramar for all hard work and wish her good luck in her future endeavors. Miramar graduate in Winter 2017 and is working towards to applying to medical school in the 2018 cycle. 

From April 30th to May 3rd, 2017, Sujay Sau, a postdoctoral fellow, participated in the TIDES: Oligonucleotide and Peptide Therapeutics Conference in San Diego, CA. There he had the opportunity to network with other research of the nucleotide and peptide community, as well as present his own research poster on the “Improved Chemical and Enzymatic Synthesis of Threose Nucleic Acid (TNA)”.

On Saturday, April 22nd, Earth Day, members of the Chaput laboratory (Randi Jimenez, Nicholas Chim, and Lynnette Jackson) participated in the March for Science in Fullerton, California. This was one of the multiple marches and rallies across the world to celebrate the science and its important role in everyday life.

[ezcol_1third][slideshow_deploy id=’1108′][/ezcol_1third] [ezcol_2third_end]During the week of April 2nd to Thursday, April 6th, members of the Chaput laboratory presented their research at the 253rd ACS Conference, held in San Francisco, CA. Three members of the chemistry group met with fellow chemists, networked with companies, and furthered their chemistry interest by attending various talks and poster presentations. Hui Mei conducted a talk on “Polymerase-mediated synthesis of TNA polymers containing a fluorescent base that can read through G-repeats in a DNA template”. Jen-Yu Liao presented a poster on “A parallel stranded G-quadruplex composed of threose nucleic acid (TNA)”. Saikat Bala also held a poster presentation on “Developing a pipeline for generating TNA phosphoramidite and triphosphate for in vitro evaluation”.[/ezcol_2third_end]

During the most recent ACS meeting, members of the Chaput laboratory met Mano Manoharan, athe Senior Vice President of Drug Discovery at Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. His interest in oligonucleotide chemistry aligns closely with the Chaput lab’s synthesis of synthetic polymers, such as TNA. We were glad to have been able to meet a fellow collaborator and look forward to future works together.

 

We bid our organic chemists (Hui Mei, Saikat Bala, and Jen-Yu Liao) a short farewell, as they head to the ACS Conference in San Francisco, CA in April 2017 to present their chemistry research before other chemists. We look forward to hearing about their conference experience and adventures in the Golden Gate City.

The Chaput laboratory would like to congratulate Miramar, one of our undergraduates of the crystallography team, for all her hard work and efforts. As of March 2017, Miramar has finished all of her coursework and is graduating from UCI with a B.S. in Pharmaceutical Sciences. She is now starting her path to medical school with studying for the MCAT and applying to medical school!