Biology and biochemistry students and staff convened in Faraday West for a special seminar Monday.

The seminar, “Labeling, Sorting and Mass Spectrometry of Phosphopeptides,” was led by Xudong Yao, an assistant professor of analytical chemistry and proteomics at the University of Connecticut, and was attended by about 40 people. He came to share his research and studies in proteins and is a personal friend of associate professor Victor Ryzhov.

“I had a couple of interesting meetings with a couple of colleagues in the chemistry department today, and I think our work is all mutually interactive and stimulating,” Yao said.

Yao’s work in proteomics, the study of the structures and functions of proteins, has yielded the dividing and sorting of phosphopeptides for analysis.

Spectroanalysis is the method of choice, according to Yao, for dividing and sorting these proteins.

“When dealing with phosphopeptides, we’re not dealing with only a couple, we’re talking hundreds at a time,” Yao said. “We’re looking to do this in a more automatic way.”

The method is still being fine-tuned, but Yao is working to mature the method so that it will help in the facilitating of disease research. Yao is also working on other projects to advance proteomics but did not disclose them.

“It was a very good talk, cutting-edge research,” said Jon Carnahan, chair of chemistry and biochemistry. “He’s a very bright, young professor on the cutting edge of science right now, so we’re very happy to have a speaker such as that come in.”

Lee Sunderlin, associate professor of chemistry, said, “There’s a huge amount of opportunities because there’s a lot of new technology and it’s going to have a lot of new applications in health sciences, and any student who learns that sort of stuff, learns those techniques, will be in excellent shape to get a job.”

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