Expert on protein folding to present Whiteley Seminar

	Robert Sauer

Dr. Robert Sauer, Whitehead professor of biochemistry at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will give the sixth annual Helen Riaboff Whiteley Seminar in Regulatory Biology for the Department of Microbiology next week.

Sauer will speak on "Sequence Determinants of Protein Folding and Degradation" at 4 p.m., Tuesday, Oct. 27, in Turner Auditorium, room D-209 of the Health Sciences Center. The lecture is open to everyone.

Sauer, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, has pioneered new genetic techniques to understand the molecular basis of protein-DNA interactions, protein folding and protein degradation within cells. He has also shown how individual amino acids have different "information content" in the folding of proteins.

His long-term research interest has been to understand how the sequence of amino acids in a protein directs the way it "folds" into a three-dimensional shape. He has also studied the way amino acid sequence and structure affect molecular recognition in the cell.

His laboratory has used small repressor proteins as model systems to study structure, folding and function. The laboratory uses protein biochemistry, mutagenesis, fast kinetics, thermodynamic analyses, molecular design and X-ray crystallography for these studies.

The seminar honors Dr. Helen Whiteley, a longtime professor in the UW Department of Microbiology until her death in 1990. A past president of the American Society for Microbiology and chair of its Publications Board, she was an eminent scientist whose research focused on control of viral transcription in Bacillus subtilis phages, on the properties of RNA polymerases, and on cloning and expression of the crystal protein gene of Bacillus thuringiensis. ¶