Student Lecture Series:

Viruses as Building Blocks for Chemistry and Biology

9:45 a.m., 331 Smith Hall

Virus particles are some of Nature most beautiful and functionally interesting examples of self-assembly. They straddle the boundaries between living and inanimate matter, and between chemistry and biology. Viruses are the largest entities to be routinely characterized by x-ray crystallography (that is, to have their structures known at atomic resolution), and the smallest entities to have a genome. We have spent the past several years learning the chemistry of a few icosahedral virus capsids. When paired with the ability of molecular biology to change the coat protein sequence, these systems become highly tailorable building blocks for a variety of applications. In this lecture, the basics of virus particle expression and chemical modification will be described, with a focus on the copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition reaction that we have developed for the purpose. Applications to cell targeting, carbohydrate antigenicity, and evolution will be featured as well.