DePaul Chemistry and Biochemistry students and faculty have been attending and presenting at conferences this spring.
Professor Southern and two student research assistants, Jenna Henning and Kirsten Kochan, attended the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Biophysical Society in Baltimore, MD from March 2 – 6, 2019. They presented a poster entitled “Structural Studies of the Fc Region of Murine Immunoglobulin G Antibodies Using Single Molecule FRET.” In this study they compared the structure of the Fc region of antibodies from mice and humans. They removed the sugars typically bound in this region, which are required for the antibodies to generate an immune response, then attached dye molecules and obtained single molecule FRET histograms of the antibody structures present. The human antibodies had a narrower range of conformations after sugar removal than the antibodies from mice. (Photos below.)
The Catalyst 