Public Health Research Institute Center
UMDNJ - New Jersey Medical School
225 Warren Street
Newark, New Jersey 07103

Phone: (973) 854-3460
e-mail: wahda@umdnj.edu


Research Summary

Proteins are the robots of the cell, performing various tasks to maintain cellular processes. At some time or another, proteins will specifically recognize a substrate, such as nucleic acid, carbohydrate, or another protein to initiate a biological event. For example, a transcription factor will bind to a specific DNA sequence to begin transcription, or a protease will recognize a particular amino acid or set of amino acids on a protein before cleaving or degrading the protein. Using x-ray crystallographic and biophysical methods, our laboratory studies protein structure and function to understand how proteins interact with substrates to control cellular processes.

The laboratory studies the mechanism of transcription in Trypanosomes. Trypanosomes are unicellular parasitic protozoa that cause a variety of diseases in humans and domestic cattle primarily in the tropical regions of the world. They display remarkable evolutionary divergence from other eukaryotes and metazoans in many well-studied molecular pathways. Although transcription in Trypanosomes is not well understood, it is already clear that differences in this pathway between Trypanosomes and humans could provide drug targets. To understand how transcription factors assemble to initiate transcription in these organisms and to provide a molecular foundation for drug design, our laboratory is working in collaboration with Dr. Vivian Bellofatto of the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, New Jersey Medical School, to solve crystal structures of Trypanosome transcription factors and their complexes with DNA.

For more information about the Wah Lab, go to www.wahlab.org

Dr. Wah is the Director of the X-ray Crystallography Core Facility at PHRI Center. For more information about this facility, visit the X-ray Crystallography Core Facility web site




Selected Recent Articles

Liu W, Das A, Aris V, Soteropoulos P, Linteau T, Lukac DM, Wah DA, and Bellofatto V. (2009) Chromatin Immunoprecipitation and Microarray Analysis Reveals that TFIIB Occupies Two Strand Switch Regions in Trypanosoma brucei Chromosomes. (submitted).

Syed Ibrahim B, Kanneganti N, Rieckhof GE, Das A, Laurents DV, Palenchar JB, Bellofatto V, and Wah DA. (2009) Structure of the C-terminal Domain of Transcription Factor IIB from Trypanosoma brucei. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 106:13242-47.

Banerjee H, Palenchar JB, Lukaszewicz M, Bojarska E, Stepinski J, Jemielity J, Guranowski A, Ng S, Wah DA, Darzynkiewicz E, and Bellofatto V. (2009) Identification of the HIT-45 Protein from Trypanosoma brucei as an FHIT Protein/Dinucleoside Triphosphatase: Substrate Specificity Studies on the Recombinant and Endogenous Proteins. RNA 15:1554-64.




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