Chris Wilds - Website
Christopher J. Wilds, Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Biological Chemistry
Education: B.Sc., Concordia University (1995); Ph.D., McGill University (2000); Post-doctoral Fellow: Northwestern University (2000); Vanderbilt University (2000-2002); Johns Hopkins University (2002-2003)
Room: SP 201.13 Laboratory: SP 185.05 E-mail: cwilds@alcor.concordia.ca Tel: 514.848.2424 x5798 Fax: 514.848.2868
Research Interests - Bioorganic Chemistry:
My research group is interested in developing chemically-modified oligonucleotides to probe various biochemical processes. One project involves the synthesis of oligonucleotides that are mimics of clinically relevant lesions formed during chemotherapy. This strategy requires skills in both solution-phase and solid-phase synthesis to prepare DNA duplexes that contain inter-strand cross-links (ICL).
These DNA probes will be used in studies that will advance our understanding of the mechanisms involved in their repair, an important step towards elucidating how some patients develop resistance to the effects of these chemo- therapeutic agents. UV thermal denaturation (Tm), circular dichroism (CD), high field NMR and X-ray crystallography are some of the techniques that will be used to determine deviations of ICL DNA from unmodified DNA duplexes. In addition, biological assays will be carried out to probe the substrate specificity of various DNA repair enzymes towards our chemically synthesized ICL DNA duplexes. By exploring structure-activity relationships of modified nucleic acids though synthesis and biophysical chemistry, students will gain expertise in several other areas of interest to the pharmaceutical field (gene silencing, RNAi, drug discovery, etc).
