Department of Biochemistry & Biophysics
University of California, San Francisco
600 16th St., Room S414
San Francisco CA
94143-2240
(415) 476-9375 (Ph)
email

Research

 

I’m interested in solving the challenging issues in biological sample preparation for high-resolution single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM). By coating graphene oxide (GO) onto grids routinely used in cryo-EM, the ultrathin hydrophilic GO film (<1 m) serves as ideal substrate, with abundant oxygen containing surface groups offering versatile functionalization routes. Derivitization of GO surface with amino groups and polyethylene glycol (PEG) has proven effective in enriching particles, improving particle distribution, changing protein orientation and keeping particles away from the air-water interface. My current research focuses on development of “purification on the grid”, which can extract proteins from unpurified or coarsely purified samples with affinity grids, i.e. grids functionalized with affinity tags.

 

 

 

Publications

 

Palovcak, E., Wang, F., Zheng, S.Q., Yu, Z., Li, S., Betegon, M., Bulkley, D., Agard, D.A., Cheng, Y., 2018. A simple and robust procedure for preparing graphene-oxide cryo-EM grids. Journal of structural biology 204, 80-84, 2018.

 

Wang, F., Yu Z.L., Betegon, M., Campbell, M.G., Aksel, T., Zhao, J.H., Li, S., Douglas, S.M., Cheng, Y.F., Agard, D.A., Amino and PEG-amino graphene oxide grids enrich and protect samples for high-resolution single particle cryo-electron microscopy. Journal of Structural Biology, 209, 107437, 2019.

 

Wang, F., Liu, Y., Yu, Z., Li, S., Cheng, Y., Agard, D.A., 2019. General and robust covalently linked graphene oxide affinity grids for high-resolution cryo-EM.

bioRxive, doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/657411.