Event
CHBE Seminar: Dr. Svetlana Ikonomova, NIST
Friday, February 7, 2025
11:00 a.m.
Room 2108 Chemical and Nuclear Engineering Building
Patricia Lorenzana
301-405-1935
plorenza@umd.edu
"Utilizing directed evolution to engineer GID4 as N-terminal proline binder for use in next-generation protein sequencing."
Abstract: Developing high throughput sequencing method for protein sequencing will have a significant impact in advancing proteomics. One approach uses N-terminal amino acid binders (NAABs) to recognize the amino acid at the N-terminus of peptide fragments of a protein, which are immobilize on a surface. Currently, however, only select number of amino acids can be recognized by NAABs engineered to have sufficient affinity and selectivity. More engineered NAABs are required to confidently identify protein sequence, especially without a priori knowledge of the target sequence. I will describe how I used protein engineering approaches to increase human protein GID4’s binding response to N-terminal proline and reduce impact on binding due to identify of the residues that follow the N-terminal proline in the peptide sequence.
I will also discuss how my protein engineering experiences has led to my current position and join the effort, with non-profit Align to Innovate, to generate standardized protocols to generate datasets that could be used create machine learning algorithm to predict protein function from sequence.
Bio: Dr. Ikonomova is a Research Chemist in the Cellular Engineering Group at National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Her current research focuses on large-scale quantitative measurements of genotype to phenotype landscapes in bacteria and yeast. Previously, she was a NRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biomolecular Structure and Function Group at NIST, where she worked to engineer the GID4 protein for protein sequencing application. Before joining NIST, Dr. Ikonomova was a postdoctoral fellow at Northwestern University in Dr. Danielle Tullman-Ercek’s lab, studying bacterial microcompartments in Salmonella enterica. Dr. Ikonomova obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD) in 2017, advised by Dr. Amy Karlsson, during which she was award Outstanding Graduate Assistant Award (2017) and the T32 NIH Host-Pathogen Interaction Training Grant (2016). After obtaining her B.S. in chemical engineering from Cornell University in 2011, Dr. Ikonomova also worked as a process engineer in semiconductor fabrication facility at GlobalFoundries Inc. before joining UMD for graduate studies.
