MARK O. LIVELY

Professor of Biochemistry
B.S., Chemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1975
Ph.D. (Chemistry/Biochemistry), Georgia Institute of Technology, 1978
Telephone: (336) 716-4674
E-mail: mlively@wfubmc.edu

The primary focus of this laboratory is on the cellular roles and mechanisms of catalysis of novel proteolytic enzymes involved in the processing and secretion of proteins from eukaryotic cells. A major objective is to describe the enzymatic mechanism of microsomal signal peptidase, an endopeptidase of the endoplasmic reticulum that is an essential component of the biosynthetic pathway of most secretory proteins. The first known inhibitors of signal peptidases have been discovered in this lab and are being used to identify the active site amino acid residues of this novel proteinase. Site directed mutagenesis of a signal peptidase substrate produced by bacterial expression is being used to explore the specificity requirements of the enzyme. In addition to these research activities, Dr. Lively is the director of the Protein Analysis, DNA Synthesis and DNA Sequence Analysis Core laboratories. The Protein Analysis Core lab provides a variety of techniques as services to the research community: amino acid sequence analysis of proteins and peptides; chemical synthesis of peptides; quantitative amino acid composition analyses; and purification of peptides and proteins by HPLC.

Recent publications:

Hook, VYH, Moran, K, Kannan, R, Kohn, A, Lively, MO, Azaryan, A, Schiller, M, and Miller, K High level expression of the prohormones proenkephalin, proneuropeptide Y, pro-opiomelanocortin and beta-protakykinin for in vitro prohormone processing. Protein Expression and Purification 10: 80-88 (1997).

Dalbey, RE, Lively, MO, Bron, S and van Dijl, JM. The chemistry and enzymology of the type I signal peptidases. Protein Science 6:1129-1138 (1997).

Walker, S. J. and Lively, M. O.: "Signal peptidase (eukaryote)," In: Handbook of Proteolytic Enzymes. (Barrett, A. J., Rawlings, N. D. and Woessner, J. F., eds.) pages 455-460 (1998).

Lively, M. O.: "Bacterial Type I Signal Peptidases," In: Proteases of Infectious Agents (Dunn, B. M., ed.), Chapter 9, pages 219-229 (1999).

Lively, M. O. and Ashwell, C. M.: "Signal Peptidases," In: Proteases, New Perspectives (Turk, V. ed.) pages 35-43 (1999).

Lively, M. O.: "Bioinformatics - Genetic Sites on the World Wide Web," In: Genetics Polymorphisms and Susceptibility to Disease (Miller, M. S. and Cronin, M., eds.) Taylor & Francis, London, pages 67-87, (2000).

Carlos, J. L., Paetzel, M., Brubaker, G., Karla, A., Ashwell, C. M., Lively, M. O., Cao, G., Bullinger, P., and Dalbey, R. E.: The role of the membrane-spanning domain of type I signal peptidases in substrate cleavage site selection. J. Biol. Chem. 49:38813-38822 (2000).

Green, N., Fang, H., Miles, S. and Lively, M.O. (2001) "Structure and FUnction of the Endoplasmic Reticulum Signal Peptidase Complex." In The Enzymes, Third Edition, Volume 23: Co- and Post-Translational Proteolysis of Proteins. (Dalbey, R.E. and Sigman, D.S., eds.), Academic Press, in press