Manuel Castro
Arizona State University
Chuck Sanders lab
The driving idea behind my project is to use nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to probe the interactions between the Amyloid Precursor Protein (APP) and small-molecule drug fragments. APP is a single-pass transmembrane protein which is expressed and processed in the brain to yield β-amyloid (βA), the hypothesized cause of Alzheimer's disease. The long term goal of this project is to develop a rigorous method for using fragment-based drug design methods on integral membrane proteins relevant to human disease. A relevant side project is to develop novel membrane mimetics that simulate near-biological conditions with implications in structural biology and drug development.