Tom Tullius

 

 

Professor, Department of Chemistry, Boston University

Current Research Interests

My laboratory develops and applies new methods for determining the structure of DNA and DNA-protein complexes. We have shown that the hydroxyl radical (•OH) is an almost ideal chemical probe for revealing the shape of a DNA molecule. My group also introduced the use of the hydroxyl radical as a high-resolution footprinting reagent for investigating the structure of DNA-protein complexes, and developed the missing nucleoside experiment as a rapid method for revealing the thermodynamically-important contacts made by a protein with its DNA binding site.

We now are using deuterium kinetic isotope effect experiments to reveal even finer details of how the hydroxyl radical cleavage pattern relates to the structure of a DNA or an RNA molecule.

We are members of the ENCODE Consortium of the National Human Genome Research Institute of the NIH. Our aim is to produce a map of the structure of the human genome, to better understand how the genome functions.

CV

Publications

Invited Lectures

Teaching

CH101: General Chemistry. Fall 2007

CH724: Special Topics in the Chemical Biology of Nucleic Acids. Fall 2006

tullius@bu.edu