DATE: Thursday December 9
LOCATION: Reed College Vollum Lounge
ADDRESS: 3203 SE Woodstock Blvd, Portland, OR 97202
URL: https://www.reed.edu/map/reed-campus-map.pdf
TIME: 6-9 PM

SCHEDULE:
6-6:45 PM: Happy hour with hors d'oeuvres & drinks
6:45 PM: Buffet dinner

SPEAKER: Dr. Julia Widom, Assistant Professor of Chemistry, University of Oregon
Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry

BIO: Dr. Julia Widom is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oregon. She earned a B. A. in chemistry from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in physical chemistry from the University of Oregon. After graduating from the U of O, Dr. Widom was a Postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan. She joined the faculty at the U of O in 2018 where she employs biophysical techniques centered around ultrafast and single-molecule spectroscopy to study RNA structural characteristics.

TALK TITLE: Probing and Perturbing RNA Structure using Fluorescent Nucleic Acid Base Analogues

ABSTRACT: RNA performs a diverse set of biological functions, acting in turn as a catalyst, an information carrier, a regulator of gene expression and more. Many of these roles require RNA to fold into specific structures and perturbations to this process can lead to disease. As a result, many techniques have been developed to study RNA folding, a number of which are based on fluorescence detection. Because RNA itself is almost completely nonfluorescent, fluorescence-based methods require artificial fluorophores to be inserted into the RNA being studied. I will present work that focuses on the class of fluorophores termed fluorescent base analogues (FBAs), which are chemically modified variants of the native bases G, A, T, C and U. Given the multitude of different interactions that contribute to RNA folding, small perturbations to geometry or hydrogen bonding can have significant functional consequences. I will first present work in which my lab used FBAs to intentionally perturb the folding of an RNA that regulates gene expression in bacteria. We substituted the adenine analogue 2-aminopurine at various sites in this "riboswitch" and utilized circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy to investigate how substitution affected the structure of the RNA and its ability to bind to the ligand that it recognizes. I will then present work in which we are using fluorescence-detected circular dichroism (FDCD) spectroscopy to selectively probe the structures of different conformational subpopulations of FBA-labeled RNA. By fine-tuning our fluorophore-labeling strategy, we can utilize FDCD to selectively record spectra of either tightly-folded or loosely-folded conformational subpopulations. This approach enables us to circumvent the problem of ensemble averaging that limits the power of bulk spectroscopic methods such as CD.

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