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Bioengineering assistant professor highlighted as “outstanding” early career investigator for work on genome-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9

Giulia Palermo, an assistant professor of bioengineering at the Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering at the University of California, Riverside, was featured in the 2021 Journal of the American Chemical Society (JACS) Early Career Investigators Issue. Palermo’s lab partnered with George P. Lisi, an assistant professor of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry at Brown University and an expert in solution NMR, to study allosteric mechanisms in the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing tool. 

Giulia Palermo UCR
Giulia Palermo

 This marks the second time Palermo has earned this recognition as the most promising young investigator in chemistry, the first time being in 2018.

Their publication, “Allosteric Motions of the CRISPR–Cas9 HNH Nuclease Probed by NMR and Molecular Dynamics”, was selected as one of 27 publications from young investigators featured in the special issue. The publication was co-authored by   

“This is an exciting and carefully executed study on a challenging and very important biological systems,” wrote Lyndon Emsley, associate editor of JACS, in the issue.

Emsley continued, “The investigators have combined experimental NMR relaxation studies with state-of-the-art MD simulations to provide new insights into the mechanism of allosteric regulation in Cas9. The work demonstrates the tremendous value of combined NMR and MD studies in characterizing allosteric networks that underlie important and interesting biology.”

Read the full virtual issue here. Read the original paper here.

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