American Chemical Society presents Dr. Julia Brumaghim, Oct. 23

Wednesday, Oct. 23, 6:30-8:30 p.m. ConocoPhillips Integrated Science Building, Room 120

As a chemistry professor at Clemson University since 2003, Julia Brumaghim's work focuses on the biological applications of inorganic chemistry, using a wide range of techniques to determine mechanisms of antioxidant activity and prevention of metal-mediated DNA damage.

Abstract: Metal-mediated oxidative DNA damage is the primary cause of cell death under oxidative stress conditions and is an underlying cause of neurodegenerative and cardiovascular diseases, cancer and aging. Antioxidants are widely studied for prevention of oxidative damage and disease, and studies of antioxidant activity typically focus on scavenging reactive oxygen species. In contrast, Brumaghim and fellow researchers have quantified and compared the abilities of widely-studied sulfur, selenium and polyphenolic antioxidants to inhibit metal-mediated DNA damage and found that these three classes of antioxidants all prevent DNA damage at biologically-relevant concentrations by directly coordinating the iron and copper ions responsible for oxygen radical generation. Polyphenolic antioxidants are very effective at preventing iron-mediated damage but much less effective at preventing copper-mediated damage, whereas the opposite is true for sulfur and selenium antioxidants. From these studies, we have developed quantitative predictive models for polyphenolic prevention of DNA damage and cell death based on their metal binding properties. In addition, we are synthesizing and characterizing coordination complexes of these antioxidants to elucidate chemical mechanisms for their antioxidant activity. This metal-binding mechanism represents an important shift in thinking about antioxidant activity and has significant implications for future directions in development of antioxidant supplements and therapies.

About the speaker: Julia Brumaghim received her B.A. in chemistry from Harvard University in 1994 and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 1999. She was an NIH postdoctoral fellow (1999-2001) in Ken Raymond's group at UC Berkeley and completed a second postdoctoral position in Stuart Linn's lab at Berkeley (2001-03). She received the ACS PROGRESS/Dreyfus Lectureship Award in 2004 and an NSF CAREER Award in 2006. In 2008, she won the Best Paper Award from A Young Investigator from the Journal of Inorganic Biochemistry.

For more information, please contact Professor John Kennish at (907) 786-1236 or jmkennish@uaa.alaska.edu.

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