Graduate student Egor Syroegin receives a 2020 Provost’s Graduate Research Award
The Graduate College recognizes PhD student Egor Syroegin for his research into ribosome-targeting antibiotics. The Provost's Graduate Research Award supports multidisciplinary scholarship and provides a way for students early in their studies to develop new research directions for their PhD dissertations or terminal degree theses.
Ribosome-targeting antibiotics are indispensable both as therapeutic agents and as tools for basic research. Recently it was shown that many classes of ribosome antibiotics exhibit so-called context dependent activity, i.e., they selectively inhibit translation of a specific set of subsequences instead of inhibiting all protein synthesis. Biochemical data suggest that substrates bounded with the ribosome (A- and P-site tRNA) are critical for inhibition efficiency – ribosome bounded with some substrates (i.e., nascent peptides) are especially susceptible to inhibition, while other substrates make inhibition ineffective. The understanding of molecular mechanisms for context specificity of current antibiotics will help to clarify fundamental mechanisms of translation modulation by a small molecule inhibitor and to assist in developing more potent or specific drugs. Syroegin’s project aims to develop a procedure for the synthesis of stable P-site substrate – non-hydrolyzable peptidyl tRNA. This tRNA, carrying either inhibition susceptible or resistant sets of peptides, will be used to reconstitute ribosomal complexes. His research will utilize X-ray crystallography to elucidate the structure of corresponding complexes and molecular determinants of context specificity.
For a complete listing of awards, visit https://grad.uic.edu/news-stories/fall20-award-winners/.