Department of Chemistry University of Turin (Italy), ATLANTIS – Centre for research on Inflammation and Metabolism in Cancer and in Chronic Degenerative Diseases Polo di Medicina Orbassano Candiolo Turin University Culture Collection – TUCC, Interdepartmental center for the conservation and enhancement of microorganisms
NMR as powerful tools in biology and in medicine
Host: S. Cacciatore
Abstract
Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy has evolved into a versatile and non-destructive tool in biology and medicine, bridging molecular structure, dynamics, and metabolism in living systems. Herein I present two examples covering some of the aspects of biology and medicine. For the medicine, in particular, NMR–based metabolomics has been increasingly deployed in clinical and translational studies to uncover biomarkers, monitor disease progression, and characterize host–pathogen interactions. At the University of Turin we used urinary proton NMR spectra combined with multivariate statistical modeling to discriminate congenitally cytomegalovirus (cCMV)–infected newborns from healthy controls, identifying a panel of altered metabolites including citrate, lactate, succinate, betaine, and threonine as markers of infection-induced metabolic reprogramming.
For the biology aspect we focused on modular polyketide synthases and nonribosomal peptide synthetases that assemble complex natural products via multienzyme interactions, often mediated by docking domains at subunit interfaces. In this work, we reveal that chain release in the enacyloxin polyketide synthase is governed by communication between an intrinsically disordered short linear motif and a β-hairpin docking domain, and they use structural, dynamic, bioinformatics, and biochemical tools to demonstrate that such motif–docking pairs are widespread and exploitable for biosynthetic engineering.
International Seminar Programme
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