Biomedical Engineering and Bioengineering Commons^™

Selective Protein Labelling To Visualize Cellular Differentiation, Andrew J. Witten, Tamara L. Kinzer-Ursem

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Protein post-translational modifications serve to give proteins new cellular function, spatial localization, or enzymatic activity. Myristoylation is a common post-translational modification where the enzyme N-myristoyltransferase adds myristic acid onto the N-terminus of a variety of proteins. In this work we use a myristic acid analog, 12-azidododecanoic acid (12ADA) to facilitate the implementation of azide-alkyne cycloaddition reactions on myristoylated proteins. Selective protein labeling methods such as these are useful in research because they can be used to help determine the biological function of this protein lipid modification and can be extended to study disregulated protein myristoylation in disease states. To validate …