Dr. M. Eugenio Vázquez
University of Santiago de Compostela
Centro de Quimica Biologica y
Materiales Moleculares (CIQUS)
Jenaro de la Fuente sn - Campus Vida
15782 Santiago de Compostela
Spain
Ph.:+34 8818 15738
FAX: +34 981 59 5012
Dare to be naive
R. Buckmister Fuller
Over the last few years there has been an enormous development in the field of Chemical Biology, to the point that most problems in biology can be now approached from a molecular perspective and biology can be considered now a molecular science. As said by Arthur Kornberg in a classic paper: “Much of life can be understood in rational terms if expressed in the language of chemistry. It is an international language, a language for all of time, and a language that explains where we came from, what we are, and where the physical world will allow us to go.” (Biochemistry 1987, 26, 6888)
Our research is characterized by a multidisciplinary problem-solving approach that includes organic synthesis, spectroscopy, biochemistry and computational chemistry, applied to the development of sensors for identification and monitoring of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions, the design and synthesis of simple chemical models of complex biological systems, and the development of chemical tools for biological research, such as new imaging strategies or caged compounds for spatial and temporal control of the biological response.
Some examples of our research include the development of new lanthanide-based sensing strategies, which allowed to obtain the first biosensor based on intermolecular energy transfer of luminescent terbium complexes (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2008, 130, 9652), the development of a phosphorylation sensor (Chem. Commun. 2012, 48, 9534) or our recent demonstration of effective signal modulation through the conformational changes experienced by peptide chains upon formation of leucine-zipper supramolecular associations (Chem. Sci. 2011, 2, 1984), or alpha-helix folgin in RNA recognition (J. Am. Chem. Soc. 2013, 135, 3812)
We are also working on new sequence-selective DNA binding molecules and probes, including fluorogenic DNA-binding aza-bisbenzamidines (Chem. Sci. 2012, 3, 2383, Org. Lett. 2010, 12, 216, Chem. Commun. 2010, 46, 5518), and metal complexes.