Harry Bermudez

1. Stabilization and enhancement of proteins using deep eutectic solvents:  Due to their widespread use in today’s society, there is a growing need to stabilize enzymes and improve their performance. Enzymes play a crucial role in the conversion of raw materials into valuable products.  Here we are pursuing a strategy of utilizing deep eutectic solvents (DES) to manipulate the local environment of enzymes and their substrates.
    
2. Supramolecular polymerization of DNA to synthesize highly repetitive proteins:  The importance of highly repetitive tandem repeat (TR) proteins is clear from their natural abundance, with greater than 60% of proteins containing TR regions. These TR proteins have been identified to play both functional and structural roles (e.g., adhesion, catalysis). Yet current approaches to construct DNA templates with repetitive regions, whether PCR-based or not, do not yield well-defined protein products.  Here we are pursuing a supramolecular polymerization approach to precisely encode TR proteins.

Research Interests

Biological polymers; self-assembly in solution and interfaces