The team welcomed Professor Bryan Dickinson (The University of Chicago, and member of the sLoLa Strategic Advisory Board) to present a seminar entitled “Chemical tools to probe signalling by protein lipidation.”Bryan discussed his team’s innovative research developing activity-based probes for thioesterase activity and inhibitors of zDHHC enzymes, as well as the use of the thioesterase probes to explore changes in S-acylation that occur in response to growth factors and other stimuli. He described novel research on the S-acylation of ERK1/2 and the downstream effects on gene expression, alongside the use of chemical probes to investigate the function of mitochondrial thioesterases and their role in regulating Peroxiredoxin (PRDX) proteins and mitochondrial redox buffering capacity. The seminar highlighted the power of modern chemical biology approaches for elucidating the functional consequences of S-acylation.
