
Department of Chemistry
865 Lederle Graduate Research Tower
710 North Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01003
(413) 545-0683
mchen1@chem.umass.edu
www.umass.edu/chemistry/about/directory/min-chen
Chen Research Group
Professor of Chemistry
Current Research
My group is developing a switchable bacterial toxin for drug delivery across the cell membrane. This toxin, engineered to become active at specific cell sites, can be potentially used as a therapeutic to treat cancers. Another ongoing project in my lab is to create a biosensor toolkit which can quickly evolve and adapt to detect any target protein molecules. This technology could lead to major advances in biomarker and warfare agent detection.
Pore-forming toxins (PFTs) and peptides can form large water-filled openings in the cell’s membrane that disrupt the delicate balance of solutes between the interior and exterior of the cell, leading to cell death. These openings also provide a direct path for drug molecules to enter the cell. We are engineering protease or light activitable PFTs based on E. coli cytolysin A (ClyA). ClyA proteins are switched on at the tumor site by tumor-specific proteases or light radiation. These ClyA kill tumor cells by a synergistic approach that combines the ClyA toxin’s cytolytic activity and the delivery of therapeutic drugs in cancer therapy.
The central goal of our biosensing project is to create a nanopore sensor that can be tuned to specifically detect virtually any protein. The sensor is an engineered form of outer membrane protein G (OmpG) from E. coli. The loops that connect the strands of OmpG’s β-barrel are either appended with a ligand or lengthened with a recognition sequence to create the specific sensing elements. A library of OmpG mutants will be selected for novel target affinity directly from the bacteria using a high-throughput screening and enrichment approach.
Learn more at Chen Research Group
Academic Background
BSc (Eng) 1996 and MSc (Eng) 1999 Tianjin University, China
PhD University of Frankfurt, Germany, 2004
Postdoctoral Training University of Oxford, UK, 2005-2008