开户即送58体验金

Topic: Activity-Based Sensing: Using Chemical Reactivity to Decode Single-Atom Chemical Biology

Speaker: Professor Christopher J. Chang

Host: Professor Ben Zhong Tang

Date: Friday, May 29, 2026

Time: 2:00 p.m. - 3:15 p.m.

Venue: SIN Wai Kin International Conference Centre (W201), Administration Building

Language: English

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Abstract:

Traditional strategies for developing selective imaging reagents rely on molecular recognition and static lock-and-key binding to achieve high specificity. We have pioneered an alternative approach to chemical probe design, termed activity-based sensing, in which we exploit inherent differences in chemical reactivity as a foundation for distinguishing between analytes that are similar in shape and size within complex biological systems. This presentation will focus on activity-based sensing approaches to visualize dynamic fluxes of metal ions, reactive oxygen species, and reactive carbon species and their signal/stress contributions to living systems, along with activity-based proteomics probes to identify their biological targets at atomic scale. As a representative example of new biological lessons learned from these chemical probes, we are advancing a new paradigm of transition metal signaling, where metal nutrients like copper can serve as dynamic signals to regulate protein function by metalloallostery and promote copper-dependent cell growth and death pathways termed cuproplasia and cuproptosis, respectively. A second example of single-atom chemical biology comes from reversible redox interconversion between methionine and methionine sulfoxide, where activity-based probes reveal the landscape of site-specific proteome modifications at single amino acid resolution to identify new redox-dependent disease vulnerabilities.

Speaker Profile:

Christopher J. Chang is the Edward and Virginia Taylor Professor of Chemistry at Princeton University. He completed his B.S. and M.S. at Caltech in 1997, working with Harry Gray, followed by a Fulbright scholar year at the Université Louis Pasteur in 1998 with Jean-Pierre Sauvage. Chris earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2002 with Dan Nocera and continued his postdoctoral studies at MIT with Steve Lippard. Chris began his independent career at UC Berkeley in 2004 and moved to Princeton in 2024.

His laboratory focuses on the study of elements in chemistry and biology, spanning transition metals, reactive oxygen species, and carbon metabolites. The Chang laboratory develops activity-based sensing and proteomics probes to investigate questions in neuroscience, cancer, and metabolic diseases, advancing new concepts that drive biology and medicine such as transition metal signaling, metalloallostery, metalloplasias, and single-atom chemical biology.

Chris has mentored over 100 graduate students and postdoctoral scholars in his laboratory, along with another 90 undergraduates and visiting scholars, with over 50 group alumni now leading their own laboratories as independent faculty. He has published over 270 papers and given over 400 invited lectures, and his laboratory’s research has been recognized with awards from the ACS (Cope, Eli Lilly, Nobel Laureate Signature, Baekeland, Bader), RSC (Transition Metal, Knowles), Dreyfus, Beckman, Packard, Sloan, Blavatnik, Sackler, Humboldt, and Guggenheim Foundations, Amgen, Astra Zeneca, and Novartis, and election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chris serves as Editor-in-Chief for Accounts of Chemical Research.

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