Welcome to the Tsao Research Group's Web Site
Meng-Lin Tsao, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
School of Natural Sciences
University of California, Merced
P.O. Box 2039
Merced, CA 95344
Office: Science & Engineering - Room 360
Phone: 209-228-4511
Fax: 209-228-4060
Fax: 209-228-4060
Email: mtsao@ucmerced.edu
Brief Bio: Meng-Lin Tsao attended National Taiwan University and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry with Prof. Kwang-Ting Liu in 1991 and 1993, respectively. After two years of mandatory military service, he returned to National Taiwan University to teach sophomore Organic Chemistry Labs for 3 years. He then pursued graduate studies at the Ohio State University under the guidance of Prof. Matthew S. Platz and was awarded a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry in 2003. Subsequently, he performed postdoctoral research in Prof. Peter Schultz’s group at the Scripps Research Institute. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Merced and is currently an assistant professor at the School of Natural Sciences.
Brief Bio: Meng-Lin Tsao attended National Taiwan University and received B.S. and M.S. degrees in chemistry with Prof. Kwang-Ting Liu in 1991 and 1993, respectively. After two years of mandatory military service, he returned to National Taiwan University to teach sophomore Organic Chemistry Labs for 3 years. He then pursued graduate studies at the Ohio State University under the guidance of Prof. Matthew S. Platz and was awarded a Ph.D. degree in organic chemistry in 2003. Subsequently, he performed postdoctoral research in Prof. Peter Schultz’s group at the Scripps Research Institute. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Merced and is currently an assistant professor at the School of Natural Sciences.
Research Interests:
- Bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology, protein chemistry and vaccine technology -
The research of the Tsao laboratory is at the interface of chemistry, biology and medicine, in which interdisciplinary research methods are employed. These include organic synthesis, phage display, DNA library construction, protein engineering, expression & purification, and bioconjugation reactions. Specific projects are briefly described as below.
Developing novel biological materials with unique chemical functions: Phage display technology is a very useful tool for generating large, diverse collections of polypeptide libraries and for subsequent isolation of high affinity ligands and receptors for novel functions. We are working on the production of useful phage display libraries for the selection of phage particles with unique catalytic activity and specificity to organic reactions. In addition, we also concentrate on the engineering of phage surface to generate a unique chemical environment by displaying thousands of repeating copies of a chosen functional group on phage.
Vaccine development for human diseases: The immune system has the ability to protect our body against infection by identifying and destroying pathogens (non-self molecules) with tolerance for our own proteins, cells, and tissues (self molecules). However, many kinds of tumor cells and disease causing self-proteins are tolerated by the patient's own immune system. Thus, we are focused on the development of vaccines against these self-antigens by the site-specific incorporation of immunogenic unnatural amino acids into target proteins.
Chemical perturbation of protein molecules: Proteins are important molecules that play essential roles for virtually every biological process in all known organisms. The complex biological functions of proteins result from polymeric combination of twenty common amino acids. Thus, to study protein function and create proteins with enhanced or new properties, it is our interest to introduce chemical perturbation into proteins by replacing those common amino acids with unnatural amino acids, bearing novel functional group, into proteins at chosen sites.