Dr. ANDREW MESECAR Walther Professor in Cancer Structural Biology 10% Biological Sciences, 90% Biochemistry Department Head, Department of Biochemistry Director, Purdue Center for Cancer Research 765-494-1924 HOCK 311 amesecar@purdue.edu

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BIO

Lab website

The main interest of the Mesecar lab is the Structure & Function of Enzymes of biomedical importance. One of our fundamental goals is to gain a deeper understanding of the roles these enzymes play in the disease process and how these enzymes recognize and catalyze the transformation of their substrates into products.  By understanding enzymes’ molecular recognition processes and their kinetic, chemical, structural and regulatory mechanisms, we can then exploit this knowledge for the discovery, design and development of small molecule drugs.  We are currently studying the structure and function of enzymes involved in promoting cancer, coronavirus infections and Alzheimer’s disease.

Due to the complex nature of enzymatic catalysis and molecular recognition, we routinely use a variety of state-of-the-art experimental approaches and tools from the fields of chemistry, biology and physics. Our main experimental tools are static and time-resolved X-ray crystallography, enzyme chemistry & kinetics, molecular biology, mass-spec proteomics, assay development and optimization, high-throughput screening and molecular modeling, cheminformatics and cryo-EM. Our multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary, collaborative and integrated approach to the elucidation of the nature of enzymatic catalysis and molecular recognition is the model for scientific investigation and education in the twenty-first century.