Koltoff Lectureship #2: Professor Suzanne Walker, How chemical genetics can reveal new biology

How chemical genetics can reveal new biology

One of the goals of chemical genetics is to uncover new biology. My laboratory has developed a platform to profile huge libraries of S. aureus mutants (~500,000 different mutants) under different treatments (e.g., perturbations with antibiotics and other compounds). By probing enormous mutant collections with small molecules, we identify the genes (gene products) that are important for a given biological process. In this lecture, I will describe our platform and how we have used it, and will then describe our discovery of a S. aureus enzyme that coordinates cell growth with cell division.

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.