Faculty
Christine Keating
cmd8@psu.edu
814-863-7832
512 Chemistry Building
Distinguished Professor
Department of Chemistry
https://sites.psu.edu/keatinggroup/
https://science.psu.edu/chem/people/cmd8
Research
Imagine if you will a primordial soup in which abiotic chemical synthesis is occurring, leading to oligomerization and polymerization of molecules that will eventually become biopolymers. Some tiny fraction of the nascent biopolymers acquire functions such as the ability to fold into secondary and tertiary structures able to catalyze reactions. How can these rare proto-biopolymers be collected together into compartments that would eventually become protocells? Associative phase separation, also called coacervation, of aqueous macromolecules to form dense, polymer-rich phase droplets could provide a simple physical mechanism to accumulate and concentrate functional molecules such as RNAs or their molecular progenitors. We explore this possibility with an emphasis on the molecular composition and physicochemical properties of the phase-separating systems, and their impact on accumulated molecules such as RNAs.
About
Christine Keating received her B.S. in Biology and Chemistry from St. Francis College (Loretto, PA) in 1991 and her Ph.D. in Chemistry from Penn State in 1997. She is currently a Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Penn State and is affiliated with the Materials Research Institute and the Huck Institute for Life Sciences. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was awarded a Penn State Faculty Scholar Medal in Life and Health Sciences in 2017. Keating serves on the editorial advisory boards of the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the Journal of Physical Chemistry, is volume editor for a Methods in Enzymology volume on Liquid-Liquid Phase Separation and Membraneless Organelles, and has (co)authored over 130 scientific articles. Her research interests combine colloid and interface science, materials chemistry, and cell biology.
