The Buettner lab continued their work on developing de novo proteins to function as hydrolases, and expanded to also work on developing mimics of natural haloperoxidase enzymes. Micaylah Bowers (’23 BMB) and Ethan Clare (’25 Chem) continued in the lab, and were joined in January 2023 by Savarna Goutam (’26 Chem and HS). Savarna began to learn the reactivity assay development and characterization that Micaylah had been working. Micaylah and Ethan presented their work at the Spring National ACS meeting in Indianapolis.
Late in the semester, Bonnie Coley (’25 Chem) and Sarah Marcus (’26 Chem) joined the lab to take over work on the haloperoxidase enzymes. Micaylah graduated in the spring, and headed to Temple to begin her Ph.D., and the rest of the lab carried on for the summer, moving each of their projects forward in understanding the key structure function relationships in our proteins.
Presentations/papers
Micaylah Bowers presented a poster at the National American Chemical Society meeting in Indianapolis titled “Structure function relationships in artificial Ti and V mini-metalloenzymes,” while Ethan Clare presented his own poster “Biophysical characterization of metal binding to de novo Due Ferri proteins.”
Prof. Buettner gave a seminar titled “Developing mini-metalloenzymes using de novo proteins,” at Sungkyunkwan University in Suwon, South Korea while visiting Prof. Frey on sabbatical, and presented a poster at the ACS meeting titled “Towards new vanadium enzyme mimics.”
The lab’s work was also presented in two posters by collaborators in the Reig lab at Ursinus College at the Spring ACS meeting, as well as in two posters at the Biophysical Society Meeting by collaborators in the Andresen lab in the Gettysburg College Physics department.
