Here is our January 2018 Newsletter!

Our group made a second trip in 2017 to Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) to collect X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) data and characterize the structures of a few human proteins’ metal binding sites. Four undergraduate students (Morgan, Erica, and Kate), one graduate visiting scholar (Ewelina), Dr. Haas and baby Ariana made the trip to meet our collaborator, Jake, at Beamline 7-3. (Thanks to Dr. Haas’s husband for a week of Beamtime Babysitting!)

It was a fun and productive trip! As always, we took advantage of the location to explore local attractions and sample some of Palo Alto’s wonder restaurants.

Congratulations to Madison on her first paper, and to the rest of our terrific research team!! Madison Sendzik lead our group’s efforts in the discovery and characterization of human serum albumin’s Cu(I) binding site! Her important discovery is published in the American Chemical Society Journal, Inorganic Chemistry (10.1021/acs.inorgchem. 7b02397). Madison also wrote a free educational article on HSA and its metal-binding properties on LibreText (click here!), and she made a 3D print of HSA available on Shapeways (click here!).

Thanks to a Neuhoff Summer Research Communities Award from Saint Mary’s College, and a 2016 Cottrell Scholar Award from Research Corporation for Science Advancement, our group has had an amazing summer of undergraduate research! We were even lucky enough to catch a photo with the American Chemical society Mole!

We are fortunate to welcome Ewelina Stefaniak to the Haas Lab from August 2017 through January 2018! Ewelina is a visiting scholar from the Institute for Biochemistry and Biophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences (IBB-PAS), where she is a graduate student in the Bal Lab, and is working to earn her PhD. Her visit to Saint Mary’s College is supported through a Grant from the Kosciuszko Foundation and additional funding from a Research Corporation for Science Advancement Cottrell Scholar Award.

While Ewelina is visiting, she will be working on a collaborative project between the Bal and Haas labs toward understanding how Cu interacts with proteins related to Alzheimer’s disease. We look forward to learning more about this important disease through Ewelina’s research! Welcome, Ewelina! we wish you a fun and productive visit to Saint Mary’s College!

Several members of the Haas group, and our collaborator Dr. Dominic Babinni, traveled to Stanford, CA to spend five days at the Synchrotron. Our long-time collaborator, Dr. Jake Pushie, met us there where he organized and delivered a comprehensive workshop on X-ray absorption spectroscopy. The whole group took shifts on the beam line so that we could collect data 24 hours a day on the Cu binding sites of some important human proteins. We are grateful to Dr. Pushie for his excellent training and the opportunity to learn from him! It has been a fun and productive trip and we look forward to the next one!

The Haas and Corcelli groups are collaborating to tackle exciting problems in bioinorganic chemistry! This week, Dr. Steve Corcelli and his group held an intimate workshop to train Notre Dame and Saint Mary’s researchers to use Amber16 to conduct Molecular Dynamics Simulations.  Thank you, to Dr. Corcelli and graduate students Cory Ayres and Shelby Brantley for your fun and informative workshop!

Students in CHEM 342 (Bioinorganic Chemistry and Material) learned fundamental concepts of inorganic and biological chemistry through a comprehensive project. Each student chose a bioinorganic system to study throughout the semester. Their task: apply fundamental inorganic and biological chemistry concepts to understand how their particular system works… then, teach their classmates and THE WORLD about their topic. Students wrote papers, created 3D print files, and printed their molecules. To top it off, each student created a molecular animation and educational video to teach the chemistry of their molecule. All of these materials will be soon be available YouTube and on LibreText (ChemWiki) so that others have access to these learning resources!