Education: Ph.D., University of Iowa, Iowa City, 1994

M.S.:Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China, 1985

B.S:Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China, 1982

  Research Interests:Inorganic/Bioinorganic Chemistry.

Our current research activities can be divided into three independent categories. The first area of our research focuses on the role of copper in human neurodegenerative diseases, especially prion diseases. The second area of our research is dedicated to the investigation of structure and function relationship of important metalloproteins using molecular/structural biology techniques. The third and the most active area of our research emphasizes the application of high-resolution multidimensional and multinuclear NMR spectroscopy to provide 3D-solution structure of several biologically significant systems, such as heme peroxidases/oxidases and copper containing electron transfer proteins.

  Publications (last three years):

  1.Carrell, C.J., Wang, X., Jones, L., Jarrett, W.L., Davidson, V.L., Jarrett, W.L., and Mathews, F. S.  “Crystallographic and NMR investigation of cobalt-substituted amicyanin.” Biochemistry, in press.

2.Zhang, J., Osborne, J. P., Gennis, R. B., and Wang, X. “Proton NMR Study of the Heme Environment in Bacterial Quinol Oxidases.” Arch. Biochem. Biophys., 421(2): 186-191 (2004).
3. Wang, X., Tachikawa, H., Yi, X., Manoj, K. M., and Hager, L. P., “Two Dimensional NMR Study of the Heme Active Site Structure of Chloroperoxidase in Solution.” J. Biol. Chem., 278, 7765-7774 (2003).

4.Feng, M., Tachikawa, H., Wang, X., Pfister, T., Gengenbach, A., and Lu, Y. “Resonance Raman Evidences of Perturbations to the Heme Active Site Structure by the Engineered Mn(II) Binding Site in Cytochrome c Peroxidase.” J. Biol. Inorg. Chem., 8, 699-706 (2003).

5.Rosenblatt, M. M., Huffman, D. L., Wang, X., Rmmer, H. A., and Suslick, K. S., “Cyclic and hairpin peptide complexes of heme.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 124, 12394-12395 (2002).

6.Sun, D., Wang, X., and Davidson, V. L., “Redox Property of an Engineered Purple Cu_A Azurin.” Arch. Biochem. Biophys., 404, 158-162 (2002).

7.Jiao, Y., Valente, E., Garner, S. T., Wang, X., and Yu, H. “Unexpected thermal rearrangement of N-alkoxycarbonyl imidazole acryl azides to imidazo[1,5-c]pyrimidinone or imidazo[4,5-c] pyrimidinone,” Tetrhedorn Lett., 43, 5879-5881 (2002).

Papers Presented (last three years)

  1.Xu , J., Lin, W., and Wang, X. “Investigation of suicide inactivation  of chloroperoxidase”, Mississippi Academy of Sciences 68^th annual meeting, February 19-20, 2004, Biloxi, MS.

2.Wang, X., Tachikawa, H., Yi, X., and Hager, L. P., “The Heme Active Site Structure of Chloroperoxidase in Solution.” Oral presentation at the 2003 Spring Symposium/Collaborative Workshop in Biomedical Research among Research Centers in Minority Institutions, San Antonio, TX.

3. Wang, X., et al. “Spectroscopic characterization of prion peptide-copper complexes,” 223rd ACS National Meeting, Orlando, FL, United States, April 7-11, 2002, p. INOR-469.