Chemistry Seminar with Dr. Lauren Buchanan from Vanderbilt University at 4:00pm

Using 2D IR spectroscopy to calculate absolute transition dipole strength (TDS) spectra, we can detect changes to protein structure that arise from post-translational modifications, mutations, or interactions with surfaces without the need for site-specific labels. The application of TDS analysis to both highly ordered protein aggregates and minimally ordered soluble peptides will be presented. Through these examples, we demonstrate TDS spectra as a label-free method to detect structural polymorphs in samples that appear identical by traditional spectroscopic methods. This talk will also address current challenges in the application of TDS to noisy or weak signals and our efforts to use machine learning approaches to improve both precision and accuracy. Further, we show that delayed pump-probe waiting times can be used to selectively oppress features in congested spectra based on differences in vibrational lifetimes