One class I took almost every semester in graduate school was organic chemistry seminar. During the seminar, graduate students would present either a research talk, literature review, or problem set depending on their seniority. 3rd and 4th years students generally presented problem sets, and I’d like to use this platform to share the problem set […]
Monthly Archives: September 2020
During my time as a Ph.D. candidate, I was tasked with creating a research proposal as part of my penultimate meeting with my doctoral committee. I was genuinely excited to take a step back from my day-to-day research and create a plan for a totally new project. Unfortunately, my advisor limited me to make proposals […]
In terms of drug design, there’s the important question of what biologically relevant molecule to target for therapeutic effects. In terms of leishmanial drug discovery, a very interesting new co-crystal structure was deposited in the protein data bank. The structure an allosteric inhibitor of Leishmania major co-crystallized with methionyl-tRNA synthetase. This interesting X-ray structure represents […]
A lot has been said about the residence time, or binding kinetics, of small molecules to their targets. Drug binding kinetics has gained increased attention in medicinal chemistry and pharmacology due to its potentially stronger correlation to in vivo efficacy of drugs relative to a drugs thermodynamic affinity for its target. Since this is a […]
About 3 years ago one of my key undergraduate professors, Alisson Shakarian, passed away. It was very shocking news since she was relatively young in age. My experiences with her were positive despite other students complaining about the difficulty of the class. Cell biology and biochemistry II were incredibly informative classes and she did a […]