Professor Kamenetska Awarded Prestigious 3 Year Air Force Young Investigator Research Program Grant
We are excited to announce that the Boston University Chemistry Department’s newest faculty member, Professor Maria Kamenetska, was recently awarded an Air Force Young Investigator Research Program Grant (AFOSR-YIP) for her novel work on robust DNA conductance and force signatures for detecting protein binding to DNA with base-pair resolution.
With the creation of the BU HUB educational requirements, Boston University has committed to a fully integrated and interdisciplinary approach to higher education. Dr. Kamenetska, who goes by Masha, holds a joint appointment between the Chemistry and Physics departments and is also a member of our Materials Science & Engineering Department. Masha’s joint appointment and her truly interdisciplinary research are an excellent example of BU’s commitment to educational integration.
The AFOSR-YIP funded project, which will support her work and that of 2 graduate students, focuses on using DNA conductivity as a sensor for DNA-protein interactions. The innovative research will first investigate the degree of electron transfer as a function of binding conformation of DNA between metal electrodes to help address some of the debates in the literature regarding electron transport in DNA. She and her research group will use this information to correlate the specific ways that DNA constructs bind in the junction and conduct current, which will create a unique conductance signature of various conformations of the DNA molecule in the junction; this will allow her and her research group to probe protein binding to specific base-pairs of that molecule. The application of this technique will be used to investigate the basic unit of Chromatin—known as the nucleosome—which controls the access of DNA for transcription and thus plays a key role in gene regulation.
Dr. Kamenetska says this about the award and the project “I am grateful to the Air Force Office of Scientific Research for this opportunity. With their support, I look forward to developing a deeper understanding of electron transport properties of DNA and using this knowledge to establish novel single molecule techniques for probing structure-function relationships in biology and material science.”