Saif Khan

I am a PhD candidate specializing in substance abuse research within the group of Cornelius Gati at USC's Bridge Institute. Specifically, my projects delve into the structure-function relationships of opioid receptors with the long-term view to improve clinical outcomes from novel analgesics. I have over five years of cumulative experience in various facets of protein production and single-particle cryo Electron-Microscopy, wholistically geared towards clinically relevant projects.

Electron Microscopy: Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryoEM) sample preparation for purified protein, cells, and crystals using Vitrobot (Mark III or Mark IV), Leica EM GP2, and manual plunger; negative stain electron microscopy; independent operation on Titan Krios and Glacios electron microscopes; EPU; EPU-D

Computational Biology: cryoSPARC, Relion, IMOD, PyMOL, Chimera, Coot, Phenix, Prism (GraphPad)

Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: molecular cloning; recombinant soluble and membrane protein expression and purification; Western blotting; insect, bacterial, and eukaryotic cell culture; co-immunoprecipitation; dynamic light scattering; fast protein liquid chromatography (FPLC); size exclusion chromatography (SEC); protein crystallization; x-ray crystallography; small angle x-ray scattering, biolayer interferometry 

Cellular functional assays: bioluminescence resonance energy transfer assays; forster resonance energy transfer assays; cyclic-AMP assays; radioisotope labeled-ligand binding assays 

• Khan, S., & Gati, C. (2023). Decoding the mechanisms of allostery. eLife, 12. doi:10.7554/elife.88749
• Dey, D., Singh, S., Khan, S., Martin, M., Schnicker, N., Gakhar, L., Pierce, B. and Hasan, S., 2022. An Extended Coatomer Binding Motif in the SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein.
• Dey, D., Singh, S., Khan, S., Martin, M., Schnicker, N. J., Gakhar, L., Hasan, S. S. (2022). An extended motif in the SARS COV-2 spike modulates binding and release of host Coatomer in retrograde trafficking. Communications Biology, 5(1). doi:10.1038/s42003-022-03063-y
• Xu, Z., Khan, S., Schnicker, N. J., & Baker, S. A. (2021). Pentameric Assembly of the KV2.1 Tetramerization domain. Acta Crystallographica Section D: Structural Biology, 78(6), 792–802. doi:10.1101/2021.11.09.467962
• Velez, G., Sun, Y., Khan, S., Yang, J., Herrmann, J., Chemudupati, T., MacLaren, R., Gakhar, L., Wakatsuki, S., Bassuk, A. and Mahajan, V., 2020. Structural Insights into the Unique Activation Mechanisms of a Non-classical Calpain a and Its Disease-Causing Variants. Cell Reports, 30(3), pp.881-892.e5.
• Gakhar, L., Bassuk, A., Velez, G., Khan, S., Yang, J., Tsang, S. and Mahajan, V., 2016. Small-angle X-ray scattering of and calpain-5 reveals a highly open conformation among calpains. Journal of Structural Biology, 196(3), pp.309-318.

Twitter: sfk@usc

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saif-khan-1698151b9/

Google Scholar: https://tinyurl.com/Google-Scholar-Saif-Khan

• Cornelius Gati, PhD

Assistant Professor,

University of Southern California

gati@usc.edu

• Nicholas Schnicker, PhD

Director, Protein and Crystallography Facility

University of Iowa

nicholas-schnicker@uiowa.edu

• Sarah J Weaver, PhD

Senior Scientist

Amgen

sweave02@amgen.com

• Vinit Mahajan, MD, PhD

Associate Professor of Ophthalmology

Stanford University

vinit.mahajan@stanford.edu

2024, 2023, 2022: 

Judge: Los Angeles County Science and Engineering Fair

2023: 

Invited talk: Molecular and Computational Biology department retreat

"Molecular basis of partial agonism at the Kappa Opioid Receptor." 

2022: 

Moderator: SoCal Cryo-EM symposium

California Nanosystems Institute (CNSI), UCLA