Alumni QB3 Fellows 2024
QB3-UCSC Graduate Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Excellence
I have been a rotation student on the CB3 track for my fellowship year. I have been fortunate to work with the McKinnie and Lokey labs thus far. In the McKinnie Lab I probed the substrate preference and activity of a PLP-dependent enzyme. My work led to the discovery and understanding of interesting background epimerization that the enzyme performs, and also which amino acids it prefers to utilize for its unique beta-substitution. I learned new techniques in NMR-based assays and began work with LC-MS techniques, which both helped validate my results. In the Lokey Lab I have been developing a cyclic peptide library to be tested against RNA structures. I am learning Solid-Phase Synthesis (SPS) of peptides and peptoid structures. I hope to soon test the nearly 200,000 compound library against telomerase RNA (and mutated variants) along with other therapeutically relevant RNAs. In doing so I will be learning how to adapt an affinity column to our RNA-cyclic peptide(peptoid) system, and validate these results through a fluorescence based assay.