The long-term goal of my research is to develop and utilize novel chemical tools to dissect functional roles of various proteins in cell-signaling networks, thus accelerating the development of effective therapeutics for the treatment of human diseases. Accordingly, two major focuses in the Zhang lab are to generate chemical probes containing reactive groups to achieve specific, covalent labeling of particular sites in proteins or DNA, and to investigate the conformational regulation of signaling proteins by small-molecule ligands.
