Greene Lab
Principal Investigator: Brandon Greene
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA)
Primary Subfield: Molecular & Cell Bio
Recruitment Status: ✅ Accepting PhD Students ✅ Hiring Postdocs
Research Focus
Project Summary Thiyl radicals lie at a perilous nexus between essential biological function as cofactors in enzyme catalysis and toxic products of oxidative stress. As a cofactor, cysteine thiyl radicals facilitate a wide range of C‐X (X= H, C, N, O, S, P) bond cleavage and formation reactions with high fidelity, requiring selective thiyl radical generation, active site chemistry, and reduction. Their reactivity, particularly within an active site with many weak C‐H bonds and oxidizable amino acid sidechains presents several alternative fates, clearly manifest in thiyl radicals generated as the product of oxidative stress “off‐ pathway,” where they can form new S−S and S−C bonds, or catalyze other chemical modifications that are deleterious to biological function. Understanding the structure/function relationship that dictates thiyl radical fate holds promise in developing better therapeutics and antibiotics that target thiyl radical enzymes, informing biomimetic or biocatalytic synthetic biology, and mitigating their role in oxidative stress. Understanding the mechanistic and contextual aspects of how thiyl radicals are generated and what dictates their fate in proteins are essent…
Active NIH Awards
- 5R35GM154993-03: Regulation and maintenance of thiyl radicals in enzyme catalysis and protein degradation (2026)
- 5R35GM154993-02: Regulation and maintenance of thiyl radicals in enzyme catalysis and protein degradation (2025)
- 1R35GM154993-01: Regulation and maintenance of thiyl radicals in enzyme catalysis and protein degradation (2024)
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