Arie E. Hawkins University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250 Office: 410-455-3867 FAX: E-mail: ahawk002@umaryland.edu Job Title: Graduate Student Ph.D. in Biochemistry (June, 2009) from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Speaker: Arie E. Hawkins, Intercampus Biochemistry Doctoral Program, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, MD 21250

Topic: Structural determination of regulatory domains present in retroviral RNA using FT-ICRMS

Place: Building 549, Conference Room B, NCI at Frederick, Frederick, MD

Time: Tuesday, April 22, 2008, at 2:00 PM

Abstract: RNA molecules can fold in very complex 3D structures that, due to their size and flexibility, may represent a challenge for NMR and X-ray crystallography. The problem is exacerbated in retroviruses by the fact that regulatory domains of the RNA genome can assume alternative conformations that mediate different functions of the viral lifecycle. Approaches based on chemical probing and MS detection (MS3D) have emerged as valid alternatives for the investigation of the structure and dynamics of functional RNA. Their development has taken advantage of the introduction of suitable software packages for translating the sparse distance constraints provided by MS3D into full-fledged, all-atom models. These approaches will be discussed using examples from HIV-1 and MMLV.

Accompanying Poster: "MS-Based 3D (MS3D) Structural Investigation of Protein-Nucleic Acids Assemblies" , authored by The Fabris Lab, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), Baltimore, MD 21250 (the poster is in a 2.2 Megabyte PDF file, which can be opened and read by using the free Adobe Acrobat Reader®)