Kolthoff Lectureship #3: Professor Suzanne Walker, Unraveling the mysteries of O-GlcNAc transferase

Unraveling the mysteries of O-GlcNAc transferase

Lecture

9:45 a.m. Thursday, April 11, 331 Smith Hall

In my third lecture, I will switch the topic from bacteria to the one eukaryotic protein my lab studies: O-GlcNAc transferase (OGT). This protein is biologically unusual and there is abundant evidence that is fundamentally important. However, why it is so important even for growth of cells in culture is not clear. One of our goals is to figure out why OGT is essential for survival. Doing so requires first establishing a chemical foundation to guide biological studies into OGT function. I will talk first about our structural and mechanistic work on OGT and then about how we developed low nanomolar inhibitors for the enzyme. I will then briefly describe what we have learned about OGT’s cellular roles using both pharmacologic and genetic approaches.  

Open Forum

4:30 p.m., Thursday, April 11, Kate & Michael Bárány Conference Room (117/119 Smith Hall)
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Professor Walker

Suzanne Walker received a Bachelor of Arts in English literature at the University of Chicago and a doctorate in organic chemistry at Princeton University. She joined the faculty at Princeton as an instructor of chemistry in 1995 and was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2001. Shortly thereafter (2003), she became the first woman to attain the rank of full professor of chemistry at Princeton. In 2004, she left Princeton to join the faculty at the Harvard Medical School. She helped build the Harvard University doctorate program in chemical biology, which was established in 2005, and has served as director of the program since 2011. She also serves as an associate editor for the Journal of the American Chemical Society, handing papers in the areas of chemical biology and biochemistry.