On September 23, Prof. Patrick R. Griffin from the Scripps Research Institute paid a visit to SIMM and delivered the lecture titled “Structure Activity Relationships of Nuclear Receptor, GPCR and Kinase Modulators Revealed with Differential HDX”.

Prof. Griffin presented the recent achievements from his research group on the mechanism and structure-function studies of enzymes and receptors, particularly G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and nuclear receptors (NRs) by combining chemical, cellular,structural biology and HDX-MS platform. His representative works included clarification of characterization of ligand activation of the vitamin D receptor (VDR) in complex with its co-receptor retinoid X receptor (RXR), understanding the biology of the orphan nuclear receptorliver receptor homolog-1 (LRH-1), screening and function validation of small molecular modulates of LRH-1, SAR analysis and discovery of novel modulates of retinoid-related orphan receptor α (RORα), clarification ofthe structure and conformational dynamics characterization of GPCRs, and revelation of ligand interactions mechanism with the beta-2 adrenergic receptor.

More than 50 people listened to the report and discussed with Prof. Griffin, including Prof. Richard Lerner, from Institute for Advanced Immunochemical Studies, Shanghai tech university, Prof.Huaqiang Xu, Prof.Hu Zhou, Prof.Naixia Zhang and Prof.Minjia Tan from SIMM.

On September 25, Prof. Hualiang Jiang, Director of SIMM, discussed withProf. Griffin about establishing HDX-MS platform in SIMM with their technical guidance.

Prof. Griffin is currently Chair of Molecular Therapeutics, Director of the Translational Research Institute at The Scripps Research Institute, Scripps Florida. His research program has a major focus on understanding nuclear receptor (NR) signaling using structural, chemical and biological approaches. His lab is well known for the development and application of biophysical methods including our HDX platform for the analysis of protein plasticity with a focus on NRs, enzymes, and GPCRs.