Matthew B. Francis

About

Matthew B. Francis is the Aldo DeBenedictis Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in 1971 and earned his B.S. in Chemistry from Miami University in 1994. He completed his Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry at Harvard University in 1999 under the supervision of Professor Eric N. Jacobsen. Following his doctoral studies, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at UC Berkeley, working with Professor Jean M. J. Fréchet from 1999 to 2001. Professor Francis's research focuses on organic, bioorganic, and materials chemistry, particularly on the development of new synthetic methods for the construction of nanoscale materials. His work involves attaching functional components to specific locations on structural proteins and enabling their self-assembly into materials with electronic and biological functions. His research includes the controlled growth of nanocrystalline arrays using cytoskeletal proteins, the synthesis of three-dimensional nanostructures from self-assembling viral capsids, and the development of new methods for site-specific protein modification. His contributions aim to advance the understanding and application of nanomaterials, with potential uses in optical, electronic, and biomedical fields.

Research topics

• Chemistry
• Social Science
• Combinatorial chemistry
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Organic chemistry
• Biochemistry
• Medicine
• Stereochemistry
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Site-Specific Bioconjugation through Enzyme-Catalyzed Tyrosine–Cysteine Bond Formation

  ACS Central Science · 2020 · 94 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  -quinones that react rapidly with cysteine residues on target proteins. This coupling reaction occurs under mild aerobic conditions and has the rare ability to join full-size proteins in under 2 h. The utility of the approach is demonstrated for the attachment of cationic peptides to enhance the cellular delivery of CRISPR-Cas9 20-fold and for the coupling of reporter proteins to a cancer-targeting antibody fragment without loss of its cell-specific binding ability. The broad applicability of th…

  DOI

• Tyrosinase-Mediated Oxidative Coupling of Tyrosine Tags on Peptides and Proteins

  Journal of the American Chemical Society · 2020 · 80 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  -quinone electrophiles from tyrosine allows greater flexibility in choosing the nucleophilic coupling partner and expands the scope of the reaction to include C-terminal positions. We also introduce a new bacterial tyrosinase enzyme that shows improved activation for some tyrosine substrates. The efficacy of several secondary amines and aniline derivatives was evaluated in the coupling reactions, providing important information for coupling partner design. This strategy was used to modify the C-…

  DOI

• Direct observation of ion emission from charged aqueous nanodrops: effects on gaseous macromolecular charging

  Chemical Science · 2021 · 51 citations

  Mechanistic information about how gaseous ions are formed from charged droplets has been difficult to establish because direct observation of nanodrops in a size range relevant to gaseous macromolecular ion formation by optical or traditional mass spectrometry methods is challenging owing to their small size and heterogeneity. Here, the mass and charge of individual aqueous nanodrops between 1-10 MDa (15-32 nm diameter) with ∼50-300 charges are dynamically monitored for 1 s using charge detectio…

  DOI

• Molecularly informed field theory for estimating critical micelle concentrations of intrinsically disordered protein surfactants

  The Journal of Chemical Physics · 2023-12-27 · 17 citations

  articleOpen access

  The critical micelle concentration (CMC) is a crucial parameter in understanding the self-assembly behavior of surfactants. In this study, we combine simulation and experiment to demonstrate the predictive capability of molecularly informed field theories in estimating the CMC of biologically based protein surfactants. Our simulation approach combines the relative entropy coarse-graining of small-scale atomistic simulations with large-scale field-theoretic simulations, allowing us to efficiently…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Improving the Academic Climate of an R1 STEM Department: Quantified Positive Shifts in Perception

  ACS Omega · 2021 · 14 citations

  Ongoing efforts to improve diversity in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) primarily manifest as attempts to recruit more women and individuals from historically marginalized groups. Yet, these efforts fail to repair the specific, systemic issues within academic communities that hinder diverse individuals from persisting and thriving in STEM. Here, we present the results of a quantitative, multiyear effort to make the academic climate of an R1 STEM department more inclusive…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Synthesis of Polymer-Protein Hybrid Materials Using Site Selective Protein Modification Reactions

  NSF · $422k · 2011–2014

• CAREER: Synthetically Modified Tobacco Mosaic Virus: A Versatile Scaffold for Nanoscale Materials

  NSF · $450k · 2005–2010

• CAREER: Toward the Creation of Custom Bacterial Organelles from Engineered /Salmonella/ Pdu Bacterial Microcompartments

  NSF · $528k · 2012–2017

Frequent coauthors

• David E. Wemmer

  QB3

  65 shared

• Alexander Pines

  University of California, Berkeley

  64 shared

• Carolyn R. Bertozzi

  Stanford University

  49 shared

• Daniel Brauer

  Instituto de Filosofía

  45 shared

• Johnathan C. Maza

  University of California, Berkeley

  43 shared

• Aaron P. Esser‐Kahn

  University of Chicago

  40 shared

• Sonny C. Hsiao

  39 shared

• Jennifer A. Doudna

  University of California, Berkeley

  38 shared

Labs

• Francis Research GroupPI

Awards & honors

• Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation New Faculty Award (2001…

Similar researchers at University of California, Berkeley

• Peidong Yangh-262
• Jennifer A. Doudnah-230
• Jeffrey R. Longh-189