Xiang Chen

Biography

Dr. Chen received his Ph. D. from Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences and his graduate work was about the structure/function studies of scorpion toxin peptides. In 2005, he joined Dr. Kylie Walters’ group at University of Minnesota as a postdoctoral associate, and started to study the ubiquitin-proteasome system by using NMR. In 2013 he moved to Maryland and became a research fellow in Protein Processing Section, Structural Biophysics Laboratory, Center for Cancer Research, National Cancer Institute. In 2016, he was promoted to be a Staff Scientist. Xiang Chen uses biophysical techniques to study how proteins are targeted for degradation. He has used NMR spectroscopy to solve the structures of the Rpn13:ubiquitin complex and of full-length hRpn13.

Research Interest

1) NMR spectoscopy, 2) structural biology, 3) computer modeling of protein structures and complexes, 4) protein engineering and isolation, 5) the mechanism of how the proteasome recognizes and processes its substrate by using various biophysical techniques, including NMR, mass spectroscopy, and computer modeling, 6) NMR and mass spectroscopy to study how small molecules interact with hRpn13 to inhibit proteasome function, 7) Structural Biology