Rate My Professor Ashton Cropp

Ashton Cropp, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Chemistry at Virginia Commonwealth University. He received his B.S. from Western Carolina University in 1997, Ph.D. from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2002, and completed an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship at The Scripps Research Institute from 2002 to 2004. Cropp is affiliated with the VCU Center for Drug Discovery, where his areas of focus are synthetic chemistry, molecular biology, protein expression, and purification. His research interests include organic chemistry, synthetic genetic code expansion, and ubiquitin protein chemistry. The laboratory is located in Oliver Hall, room 3047.

Cropp's Google Scholar profile indicates 4,701 citations overall, 1,021 since 2021, an h-index of 24, and research interests in chemical biology. Key publications listed on his VCU faculty profile are: Li Y, Reed M, Wright HT, Cropp TA, Williams GJ. Development of Genetically Encoded Biosensors for Reporting the Methyltransferase-Dependent Biosynthesis of Semisynthetic Macrolide Antibiotics. ACS Synth Biol. 2021; Zhou H, Cheung JW, Carpenter T, Jones S, Luong NH, Tran NC, Jacobs SE, Cropp TA, Yin J. Enhancing the incorporation of pyrrolysyl derivatives into proteins with the methylester form of unnatural amino acids. Bioorg Med Chem Lett. 2020, 30, 126876; Braxton CN, Quartner E, Pawloski W, Fushman D, Cropp TA. Ubiquitin chains bearing genetically encoded photo-crosslinkers enable efficient covalent capture of (poly)ubiquitin-binding domains. Biochemistry. 2019; Kasey CM, Zerrad M, Li Y, Cropp TA, Williams GJ. Development of Transcription Factor-Based Designer Macrolide Biosensors for Metabolic Engineering and Synthetic Biology. ACS Synth Biol. 2018, 7, 227-239; Ring CM, Iqbal ES, Hacker DE, Hartman MCT, Cropp TA. Genetic incorporation of 4-fluorohistidine into peptides enables selective affinity purification. Org Biomol Chem. 2017, 15, 4536-4539. He has advised doctoral dissertations including E.M. Nicholson's 'Creation of Chemically Reactive Ubiquitin Probes by Genetic Code Expansion' (2022), W.D. Kinney's 'Expansion of the Genetic Code to Include Acylated Lysine Derivatives' (2019), and B. Shakya's work on hyperaccurate ribosomes (2023).