ESPCI web site
Thursday October 26 at 11 am in Amphi Charpak.
Graham Ellis-Davies, Department of Neuroscience, Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York.
Photosensitive protecting groups were developed in the 1960s by synthetic organic chemists, with the idea that would offer an alternative to traditional techniques for masking functionalities during multi-step synthesis. Such methods proved highly impactful with the Affymetrix “gene chips”, introduced in 1991. However, before this, Kaplan pioneered the application of such protecting groups to cell physiology as early as 1978, with the development of “caged ATP”. Following this, I developed caged calcium with Kaplan in the 1988-1994 period. The latter proved to be easily the most widely used in physiological studies, with many hundreds of studies published. Recently, my lab has developed a series of new chromophores that improve the 2-photon cross-section of the original photosensitive protecting groups 350,000-fold, and enable wavelength selective photorelease of two biomolecules with real orthogonality. I will discuss recent efforts to accomplish the latter with violet and green light, and the development of caged drugs for in vivo uncaging in freely moving animals.