Jim Wells Colloquium

Essay
Xuewen Du
Among all the seminars I took part in, several colloquiums impressed me greatly.
I am most impressed on the colloquium by Jim Wells (UCSF) and I believe that his talk owns the best scientific content. His talk mainly focused on some challenging targets that are used for drug discovery. In his talk, he introduced that they utilized the standard high-throughput screening (HTS) and disulfide trapping methods to study the small molecule inducer of cell death. One of the most interesting results I think is the studies of cell death mechanisms with some specific inflammatory caspases inhibitors (e.g., Pan Caspase Inhibitor, Z-VAD-FMK, etc.). They proved that cell death caused by the drug was not related to the protein, caspase, by

David Lynn (Emory University), which helps the audience to have a good knowledge of the structures and forces during the supramolecular self-assembly process, and understand how the chemical information will be stored and translated into the new molecules in this process. His talk mainly focused on the mutant peptides of Aβ Amyloid protein that is well-known to be responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. By characterizing the properties of self-assembly of different pieces of peptides from Aβ Amyloid protein, he showed that this sequence specificity played an important role in self-assembly of these mutant peptides in vitro. In addition, I think he clearly explained the design of an in vivo genetic assay that is based on the use of the yeast prion, the Sup35 of S. cereviseiae. They studied the mechanism of this supramolecular self-assembly process according to the score able phenotype with this in vivo assay. Prof. Lynn recognized that his audiences are from diverse scientific background, who may know little about their field, and he gave an adequate explanation about his project. He just used the simplest model, the white background and black words, which makes his slices comfortable and makes the audience easier to pay attention to his presentation. In addition, Prof. Lynn organized his presentation in a logical way. First, he explained the background of the topic comprehensively, and then he transited to his research from the

Suning Wang, from Queens University, who talked about the organoboron-enabled transformation and applications. I have to admit that she's one of the few Chinese people whose English is quite good, with little accent. However, I feel she is a bad presenter. She talked about her work about the organoboron-functionalized molecules that are combined with either a main group element or a transition metal ion to study the unusual chemical transformations. I think that her slides are clear, but not that convincing. Besides, she spent little time talking about the background, like why her work is important, etc, which means that she is not adequately sensitive to the diverse scientific background of the audience, at least to me. In addition, I think she did not give a comprehensive story about her research and thus difficult to be understood. Because I am not familiar with this photochemistry field, this presentation method makes me to feel boring and not to know what she was saying