Professor David E. Wemmer of UC Berkeley visit WIPM

On November 20, 2018, Professor David E. Wemmer of UC Berkeley visited Wuhan Institute of Physics and Mathematics (WIPM), Chinese Academy of Sciences at the invitation of Professor Xin Zhou, and gave an academic report entitled "Protein structural mechanics of bacterial transcriptional activation by sigma54 polymerase" in the 34th Tianjuan Spectrum Forum.

Prof. David Wemmer received B.S. degrees in Math and Chemistry from UC Davis in 1973, and Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from UC Berkeley in 1978. After postdoctoral work in Germany and a period on the staff at Stanford, he joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1982. In 1985 he returned to Berkeley on the faculty rising through the ranks, and served as Department Chair and Executive Associate Dean of the College. The focus of Prof. Wemmer’s research has been structural biology using NMR, but with significant work in analytical chemistry and use of other structural methods. He has published over 250 journal articles, 50 reviews and commentaries, and a textbook on Biophysical Chemistry. He was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

During the report, Professor David E. Wemmer show us how sigma54 polymeraseworks in the process of bacterial transcriptional activation, and expounded the structure and function of the domain of the enzyme. In addition, the structure information of the enzyme was investigated by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. This lecture gives us a deeper understanding of the structure, dynamics, and function of biological molecules.

After the report, Professor David E. Wemmer had an in-depth discussion with the teachers and students present.