About the Seminar:

The complexity of protein folding and unfolding in the cell is staggering, and is affected by many factors. A major factor is the role of RNA as both a chaperone and aggregation-inducer. In this seminar, I will discuss our investigations into which RNAs are important, what they are doing with regards to both protein folding and misfolding, and how this impacts neurodegenerative disease and aging. We will conclude by discussing our work incorporating structural biology data and educational tools into the biochemistry citizen science video game Foldit.

About the Speaker:

Scott Horowitz did his undergrad and masters at Wesleyan University, and received his PhD from the University of Michigan as a dual student in the labs of Raymond Trievel and Hashim Al-Hashimi studying the role of carbon-oxygen hydrogen bonding in methyl transfer. He then moved the James Bardwell’s lab at Michigan and HHMI for his postdoc, where he studied how chaperones help proteins fold. In 2017, he started his own lab at The University of Denver studying primarily how nucleic acids affect protein folding and aggregation. When not in lab, Scott can often be found singing, playing, or listening to music.