Anthony Meger, an IPiB graduate student, will be defending his Ph.D. research on May 10.
As a member of the Raman Lab, Meger has worked on protein engineering, with a focus on split-protein systems.
As the name implies, split-protein systems – which have many applications, including helping to identify protein-protein interactions and therapeutic uses in cancer treatment – require splitting a protein into two pieces and controlling the conditions under which they reunite. This is no easy task.
“It’s a tricky problem,” explains Meger. “When you cut a protein in half, you’re exposing its core. The protein wants to come back together as soon as you split it, so we have to introduce mutations to prevent that. But making mutations could cause the protein to misfold and become inactive, even when the two parts come back together. And we don’t want that, either.”
To find solutions to these problems, Meger used computational models to determine optimal mutations to destabilize the protein enough to keep the pieces separated without causing damage to the protein’s function when the pieces reunite.
His research has been published in several journals, including Nature Chemical Biology, and he has additional publications currently under review.
Meger, who will be the first person in his family to earn a Ph.D., has already been putting the skills and knowledge he has built in graduate school to work, consulting as a senior protein engineer at Flagship Pioneering and collaborating on the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center Enzyme Improvement Team. He plans to continue on to a career in industry after graduating.
To learn more about Meger’s research, attend his Ph.D. defense on Wednesday, May 10 at 2:00 p.m. CT in Room 1211 of the DeLuca Biochemical Sciences Building.