Elizabethtown College Professor of Chemistry Presenting at ACS Meeting

Elizabethtown College Professor of Chemistry James MacKay is presenting at the American Chemical Society (ACS) Fall 2021 Resilience of Chemistry meeting. The annual meeting is taking place on August 22-26 and is both virtual, as well as in-person at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta.

MacKay’s talk will take place virtually on Sunday, August 22 at 5 p.m. He will be presenting his paper, “Design, synthesis, and binding of extended nucleobases in modified peptide nucleic acids for sequence selective recognition of dsRNA.”

Etown’s Professor of Chemistry collaborated with Eriks Rozners of SUNY Binghamton to study new methods for molecular recognition of biologically significant non-coding ribonucleic acid (RNA) and uses chemistry to better understand the role of non-coding RNA in biological processes, through a grant that was recommended for funding by the National Science Foundation.

The work is timely given the current interest around RNA related to emerging pathogens such as the SARS-CoV-2 virus and biotechnological tools such as CRISPR gene editing. The now six-year collaboration has established a bridge between Etown students who are transitioning from undergraduate studies to graduate studies at a research university while also offering unique training for a post-doctoral student who wishes to work for a primarily undergraduate institution.