Robert Everett Jefferson

I am engineering GPCRs to alter their ligand binding properties, creating variants that have specific and novel signaling responses. Before working in the Barth lab, I studied membrane protein folding in James Bowie's lab at UCLA, where I probed the rather interesting folding of a chloride transporter from E. coli. Before that I employed the steric trap method (developed in the Bowie lab) to study membrane protein folding under native conditions and measured the extremely slow unfolding kinetics of the E. coli membrane enzyme diacylglycerol kinase. Before that I dabbled in membrane protein crystallography and methods to stabilize membrane proteins. Before that I was an undergraduate at Whitman College where I worked in Doug Juers lab studying the structure of myelin basic protein. Before that I was a youth of minor consequence.