EN Seminar: Dec. 20,2024

Date: December 20, 2024 12:00 pm (ET)

Speaker(s)

  • Hui Peng
    Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto

Title:
Towards understanding general chemical – protein interactions in humans

Abstract:
Millions of synthetic and natural chemicals enter the human body every day. These chemicals can have beneficial or detrimental effects on health, depending on how they interact with the 20,000 human proteins. My group’s research focuses on systematically understanding the interactions between millions of chemicals and human proteins. This objective is made possible through collaborations with a team of structural biologists, medicinal chemists and AI researchers at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC). To achieve this, we have developed three complementary protein affinity selection mass spectrometry (ASMS) platforms: 1) Direct isolation of ‘dark matters’ of bioactive chemicals from extracts; 2) Proteome-wide discovery of interactions for prioritized chemicals (e.g., ToxCast); 3) Scalable interaction mapping between 460,000 compounds and human proteins, generating data for machine learning algorithm development. Our vision is to establish an ASMS:AI research center to systematically evaluate billions of protein-chemical interactions, which will facilitate the scalable discovery of bioactive chemicals and advance AI-driven ligand discovery for therapeutic and environmental applications.

Bio:
Hui Peng is an Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto, Canada. He received his B.Sc. and Ph.D. at Peking University in 2008 and 2013, respectively. After graduating, Hui Peng spent three years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and University of Saskatchewan. Hui Peng joined the department of chemistry at the University of Toronto as a faculty member in 2017. His research focuses on establishing the environmental Chemical-Protein Interaction Network (eCPIN) by pursing two research directions: 1) Identification of exogenous and endogenous ligands using protein-guided nontargeted analysis. 2) Identification of protein targets through chemical proteomics. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed papers and has received multiple awards including the Chemical Institute of Canada’s Early Career Research Award (2024), ACS James J. Morgan Early Career Award (2023), and the Ontario Early Researcher Award (2022).