Tilstra Laboratory
Research
Probing
the mechanism of peptide aggregation
Luanne Tilstra, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Chemistry
The aggregation of peptides into an insoluble inclusion body is a
serious problem for biotechnology and biomedical research.
Moreover, peptide self-assembly into aggregates can have a profound
effect on the processing and effectiveness of therapeutic
peptides. It is the goal of this lab to establish experimental
methods that effectively probe the mechanism of the self-assembly and
aggregation of the insulin peptide. This is done through the use
of a variety of spectroscopic techniques—absorbance fluorescence,
anisotropy decay, and resonance light scattering—and a method which
involves the use capillary electrophoresis (CE) to separate the
aggregates according to size and laser light scattering (LLS) to
determine both the size of the particles and how many particles there
are of each size. Undergraduate projects in this laboratory fall
into four categories: refining CE-LLS instrument design, traditional
spectroscopic studies of insulin, establishing the experimental methods
for CE separation of insulin aggregates, and modeling the aggregation
process.
