Endroit: A-2553 - Campus MIL
Heure: Dès 11h00
Titre: Perfecting the Art of Fluorophore Design.
Résumé: Fluorophores stand as indispensable tools within chemical biology. The complexity of biological processes, such as disease progression, requires simultaneous monitoring of multiple entities. Therefore, success in studying these processes is intimately connected to the rational design, and synthesis of bright, stable fluorescent molecules. My career has been a committed pursuit of perfecting the art of fluorophore design by 1) developing new fluorescent scaffolds for biological applications, 2) enhancing fluorophore performance for single-molecule microscopy, and using these probes for 3) understanding the dynamics of viral polymerases. Currently, common commercially available synthetic fluorophores for biological applications rest on four foundational cores: coumarins, cyanines, xanthenes and boron dipyrromethenes (BODIPYs). While these scaffolds have undoubtedly provided useful fluorophores, some have been exploited for over a century. Therefore, I have been pursuing new robust macrocyclic fluorophores that offer properties unattainable with planar scaffolds, expanding the chemical space available. When moving to more sophisticated techniques, such as single-molecule microscopy, the requirements are stricter as fluorophores are obliterated by the high-power densities used. Currently, I am improving fluorophores from a whole new perspective, testing new photostabilizing and photoswitching agents for single-molecule microscopy. Lastly, we utilize these agents to investigate viral polymerase interactions with RNA substrates. Our research explores the dynamic interactions between the SARS-CoV-2 core polymerase components and their target RNA. Overall, this research contributes to the challenging task of designing stable reporter molecules and advancing our understanding of biological systems.
