Areas of Interest
Our group is primarily focused on developing ion mobility-mass spectrometry (IM-MS), an emerging technology that can determine the composition, size, and topological organization of protein assemblies from a small amount of sample, in the presence of impurities and structural heterogeneity, as a tool for structural biology. This focus necessitates research projects that span a wide range of topics. Some of these projects are focused on classical analytical chemistry, including IM-MS instrument development and the construction of computational tools for IM-MS data analysis and 3D model generation. Other projects focus on the collision induced unfolding (CIU) of protein complexes in the gas-phase, which we are building into a technology for protein inhibitor discovery and rapid biotherapeutic characterization. Still others involve the study of protein self-assembly, aggregation and amyloid formation. Our long-term aim is utilize IM-MS data alongside other protein structure determination approaches to support the emerging field of integrative structural biology – where many pieces of data derived from disparate techniques are combined to generate a more-complete picture of an assembly than was possible with any one tool.