About
Professor Wang applies interdisciplinary structural biology to study the fundamental mechanisms and drug discovery in Alzheimer's disease and cancer.
Research
My research focuses on the structural mechanisms and drug discovery in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Hedgehog signaling and p53 in cancer, which have tremendous impact on human health. In AD, we are studying the structural mechanisms of the generation of amyloid-β peptide (Aβ). We also study the interaction between glycan and tau, which facilitates the spread of tau pathology, neurofibrillary tangle (NFT, the other pathological hallmark of AD). Another focus is the mechanisms of ApoE isoform which modulates AD risk. In cancer, we are studying the structural mechanism of Hedgehog signaling and p53 interactions.
Alzheimer's disease: amyloid production, aggregation and interaction, Hedgehog autopocessing: mechanism and relevance to cancer, drug discovery in Alzheimer's and cancer, NMR spectroscopy, inteins: structure and mechanism
Teaching
By appointment
BCBP 4870/6870 - Protein Structure Determination
X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) are used to determine 3-D structures of biological macromolecules at atomic resolution. The course will cover crystallographic and NMR methods, their theory and practice, along with thermodynamics of structure formation and molecular dynamics. Students will prepare a poster presentation on a protein of their choice. Students cannot obtain credit for both this course and BCBP 6870.
BCBP/BIOL 4550/6420 - Molecular Modeling
This course covers the theory and practice of the structural modeling of proteins and other biomolecules using informatics-driven and energy-based approaches. Topics include template-based comparative modeling, secondary structure prediction, tertiary structure prediction, protein classification, sidechain rotamers, docking, protein design, energy minimization, electrostatics, molecular dynamics, and molecular surfaces. Molecular modeling software will be provided. Laptop computers are required. BIOL 4550, BIOL 6420, BCBP 4550, and BCBP 6420 meet jointly; only one of these courses can be taken for credit.
Publications
The following is a selection of recent publications in Scopus. Chunyu Wang has 161 indexed publications in the subjects of Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, Medicine, Chemistry.