IBCS seminar - "Sulfur, Sulfur Everywhere! Chemical Tools for H2S Detection and Delivery"

Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and related reactive sulfur species are now recognized to play important roles in biology, health, and disease. Aligned with this increased interest, chemical tools that enable H₂S delivery and detection have emerged as key research tools with high pharmacological potential. This presentation will focus on our efforts to develop and apply new H₂S detection and imaging technologies, including applications in organelle-targeted H₂S sensing motifs and H₂S imaging in live larval zebrafish using light-sheet fluorescence microscopy (LSFM). Complementing new methods for H₂S imaging, this presentation will also discuss our recently-developed H₂S donors that can be engineered to respond to specific biological, chemical, or bio-orthogonal stimuli. These systems function by the intermediate release of carbonyl sulfide (COS), which is quickly converted to H₂S by the ubiquitous enzyme carbonic anhydrase. In addition to providing a robust class of H₂S donors, initial biological studies suggest that COS may have biological roles distinct from those of H₂S, raising the possibility that COS may be a new biologically-relevant sulfur-containing biomolecule for future study.

A list of future speakers can be found at:  http://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/events/ibcsseminarseries/