Professor Daniel Harki

The Harki laboratory works across the chemistry-biology interface to design and develop novel, biologically active small molecules. One project in the laboratory is the development of non-natural nucleic acid probes to study dynamic processes of protein-DNA interactions, especially the interactions between the NF-kappaB transcription factor and DNA. The non-natural DNA oligonucleotides, prepared synthetically in the laboratory, are born largely out of computational-based design. The researchers are also developing small molecule and nucleic acid inhibitors of APOBEC3-family proteins, and protein-ligand docking are critical computational experiments we perform in this effort. Access to MSI resources greatly benefits this research program.