Yijun Gu

--Establishing, maintaining, and running of three Protein Crystallography beamlines and endstations in the Shanghai Synchrotron Radiation Facility, playing pivotal role in beamline design, construction of the three synchrotron beamlines and protein crystallographic endstations --As experienced protein crystallographer, solved and finished 13 protein crystal structures in the collaborative projects, summing up my protein structures to 25

Leadership and execution of computational chemistry, providing molecular modeling, structure-based drug design to accelerate drug discovery projects * Played pivotal role in business development, acquiring 10 projects from overseas clients * Accelerated more than 5 medichem projects * Leadership in combinatorial/ focused library design: designed/co-designed or characterized more than 100 libraries for various overseas clients * Supported drug discovery projects of cross-functional teams. Applied compound design, QSAR analysis, pharmacophore model mining, free energy prediction and ab initio calculation to projects spanning broad stages of pharmaceutical research including HTS hits triage, fragment-to-lead advancement, and lead optimization * Accelerated an important Dye-sensitive Solar cell Project by quantum mechanic calculation of designed organic molecules * Mitigated hERG liability on multiple projects by homology modeling * Established protein crystallography platform for ChemPartner

Managed contract research projects in novel formulation discovery arena with an emphasis on traditional Chinese medicinal resources. High quality work consistently led to repeat business with cosmetic companies such as Nevea, DSM, Amway etc. * Verified 15,000 compounds in traditional Chinese Compound Database, leading to successful drug discovery initiative with oversea clients * Acquired two grants on TCM innovative research from Shanghai municipal government

-Collected synchrotron data of various protein crystals at BNL and ARGONNE for more than twenty times - Solved and refined the structure of shikimate kinase from Mycobacterium Tuberculosis at high resolution using multi-wavelength anomalous dispersion technique (Pt-MAD). - Solved the structure of shikimate dehydrogenase from Aquifex aeolicus (Hg-MAD). - Solved and refined the structures of mGSTA4-4 mutant, a new mu-class GST from mouse (mGSTM6-6), and a new alpha-class GST from human (hGSTA3-3), which has very low activity toward most of the common substrates for GSTs * Solved and refined the structures of mGSTA1-1,mGSTA2-2, mGSTA1-2, and elucidated the catalytic mechaism -Solved and refined the structures of ERA, a GTPase-dependant cell cycle regulator containing RNA-binding motif, in complex with GDP, and a GTP analog GMPPNP - Crystallized 11-mer modified oligoribonucleotide which was used as a substrate for RNAse III. - Participated in the structure-based drug design of a pi-selective glutathione S-transferase (GST) ligand that reduces resistance to the arsenite antileukemic agent in a pi-GST over-expressing transformed cell line. -Characterized the enzymatic properties of hGSTP1, hGSTA1, and hGSTM1 to newly-designed NO-releasing prodrug JS-K

Crystallized and solved the structures of two new alpha-class glutathione S-transferases (GSTs) with exceptionally high catalytic efficiency toward the detoxification of a potent environmental carcinogen (+)-anti-7,8-dihydroxy- 9,10-oxy-7,8,9,10- tetrahydrobenzo [a]pyrene [(+)-anti-BPDE] at high resolution to explain detoxification mechanisms of the enzymes and initiate further mutagenesis studies * Expression and purification of hGSTP1-1[IV], hGSTP1-1[VV], mGSTA1-1, mGSTA2-2, mGSTA3-3 using GST-affinity column at 10 mg level * Kinetic study of catalysis of hGSTP1-1[IV], hGSTP1-1[VV], mGSTA1-1, mGSTA2-2, mGSTA3-3 toward various xenobiotics