On November 2nd, 2015, Prof. Nicolas Winssinger from the University of Geneva in Switzerland visited our college at the invitation of Prof. Xiaoyu Li and Prof. Zhen Yang. On the morning he attended one-on-one meetings with some of the professors in our school and then had lunch with students, where they discussed some problems on peptides. Later in the afternoon, Prof. Winssinger gave us a lecture titled " PNA-programmed self assemblies in chemical biology " at E104.
Prof. Nicolas Winssinger was born in Belgium and received his B.Sc. in chemistry from Tufts University. He then carried out his doctoral studies under the tutelage of professor K. C. Nicolaou at The Scripps Research Institute from 1995. After his PhD in 2000, he remained at Scripps to work in the group of professor P.G. Schultz as an NIH postdoctoral fellow. In 2002, he joined the Strasbourg University (formerly Université Louis Pasteur) as an assistant professor and was promoted to full professor in 2005. In 2012 he moved to the University of Geneva where he currently is a professor in the department of organic chemistry. His current research aims to develop enabling methods in chemistry to further our understanding of complex biological networks. An important theme is the use of unnatural nucleic acid (PNA) to program spatial organization and reactivity, including directed evolution of small molecules and catalyst, templated directed chemical synthesis, natural product synthesis and diversity-oriented synthesis. Till now, he has published 116 pioneering works in the field of PNA and total citations of which are 5132.
In the report titled " PNA-programmed self assemblies in chemical biology ", Prof. Winssinger introduced attractive properties of Peptide Nucleic Acids (PNA) with their robust and stable hybridizing nature than their natural counter parts. Several applications from his laboratory to program self-assemblies of small molecules, template chemical reactions or display multimeric ligands was presented. His humorous and energetic talk impressed us with the power of PNA in probing protein functions and understanding complex living systems, which also provided some insights for researchers working in chemical biology.