Catherine Henry (KOEHLER LAB)

Developing High-throughput, Quantitative Platforms to Identify the Targets of Small Molecules

Current target identification approaches are unable to reliably detect interactions between chemically unoptimized small molecules and protein targets. These methods are generally limited by time-consuming chemical modifications and high background signals. To address these issues, I have developed a method to rapidly and generally append chemical moieties to small molecules and a proteomics workflow that uses covalent enrichment to detect low abundance small molecule-protein interactions.

Brooke Huisman (BIRNBAUM LAB)

Tool Development for Studying Peptide-MHCII Binding in a Globally-Representative Manner

Major histocompatibility complex proteins (MHCs) present peptides on the cell surface for surveillance by T cells, playing a critical role in infection, cancer, and autoimmunity. To study peptide MHC class II binding in high-throughput, we have developed a yeast display-based platform, and we adapt it for pathogen-specific profiling and computational peptide optimization. Our ongoing work aims to expand these tools across MHC alleles and apply them to antigen discovery in autoimmunity.