Eric Boder, Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, joined the faculty at UT-Knoxville in 2007. His research program focuses on protein engineering and applied molecular biology.
He recently published, in collaboration with Wei Jang, an important paper “High-throughput engineering and analysis of peptide binding to class II major histocompatibility complex (MHC) proteins” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. This paper describes a new approach for rapidly assessing the relative binding affinity of antigen peptides to class II MHC proteins using surface display on yeast, with quantitative ability rivaling that of much more time-consuming and labor-intensive in vitro biochemical methods. The paper opens the door to a better understanding of structure-function relationships in this important molecule, and represents an early step toward molecular engineering of T cell-mediated immunity.
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