Cysteine-Mediated Redox Signaling: Chemical Tools for Biology Discovery
Kate Carroll
Associate Professor, The Scripps Research Institute - Florida
The exploration of thiol-based redox regulation and signaling offers a grand challenge for achieving a molecular-level understanding of its unique role in physiology and pathology. Redox biology also represents a frontier for developing new therapeutics for cancer, neurodegenerative, and metabolic diseases. We are developing novel small-molecule probes as a way to identify and study the underlying chemistry that governs thiol-based redox signaling. This talk will present our latest results in the discovery and understanding of reactive oxygen species as emerging new chemical signals and their influence on protein function vis-à-vis the oxidative post-translational modification of pivotal cysteine residues.
Kate S. Carroll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at The Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Florida. She received her B.A. degree in Biochemistry from Mills College in 1996 and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Stanford University in 2003. Her postdoctoral work was completed at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a Damon Runyon-Walter Winchell Chancer Fund Fellow with Prof. Carolyn Bertozzi. She was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan until 2010, when she joined the Chemistry faculty at Scripps. Her research interests span the disciplines of chemistry and biology with an emphasis on studies of sulfur biochemistry pertinent to disease states. Her lab focuses on the development of novel tools to study redox modifications of cysteine thiols, profiling changes in protein oxidation associated with disease, and exploiting this information for development of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. In addition, her group investigates sulfur pathways that are essential for infection and long-term survival of human pathogens such as Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Dr. Carroll currently serves on the editorial board of Cell Chemistry Biology, Molecular Biosystems, The Journal of Biology Chemistry, and is a contributing member of ‘Faculty of 1000’. She is also the recipient of the ACS Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry (2013), Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award (2010), Scientist Development Award from American Heart Association (2008), and Special Fellow Award from the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (2006).