The alpha helix (α-helix) is a common motif in the secondary structure of proteins and is a right hand-helix conformation in which every backbone N−H group hydrogen bonds to the backbone C=O group of the amino acid located four residues earlier along the protein sequence.
Peripheral membrane proteins, or extrinsic membrane proteins, are membrane proteins that adhere only temporarily to the biological membrane with which they are associated. These proteins attach to integral membrane proteins, or penetrate the peripheral regions of the lipid bilayer. The regulatory protein subunits of many ion channels and transmembrane receptors, for example, may be defined as peripheral membrane proteins. In contrast to integral membrane proteins, peripheral membrane proteins tend to collect in the water-soluble component, or fraction, of all the proteins extracted during a protein purification procedure. Proteins with GPI anchors are an exception to this rule and can have purification properties similar to those of integral membrane proteins.
Peter B. Moore is Sterling Professor emeritus of Chemistry, Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University. He has dedicated his entire career to understanding the structure, function, and mechanism of the ribosome.
Lubert Stryer is the Emeritus Mrs. George A. Winzer Professor of Cell Biology, at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research over more than four decades has been centered on the interplay of light and life. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Science from President Bush at a ceremony at the White House for elucidating the biochemical basis of signal amplification in vision, pioneering the development of high density microarrays for genetic analysis, and authoring the standard undergraduate biochemistry textbook, Biochemistry. It is now in its ninth edition and also edited by Jeremy Berg, John L. Tymoczko and Gregory J. Gatto, Jr.
Frederic Middlebrook Richards, commonly referred to as Fred Richards, was an American biochemist and biophysicist known for solving the pioneering crystal structure of the ribonuclease S enzyme in 1967 and for defining the concept of solvent-accessible surface. He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas. In addition to the protein crystallography and biochemistry of ribonuclease S, these included solvent accessibility and internal packing of proteins, the first side-chain rotamer library, high-pressure crystallography, new types of chemical tags such as biotin/avidin, the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shift index, and structural and biophysical characterization of the effects of mutations.
Richard Henderson is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. Henderson shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank.
William F. "Bill" DeGrado is the Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Joseph Stewart Fruton, born Joseph Fruchtgarten, was a Polish-American biochemist and historian of science. His most significant scientific work involved synthetic peptides and their interactions with proteases; with his wife Sofia Simmonds he also published an influential textbook, General Biochemistry. From 1970 until his death, Fruton worked extensively on the history of science, particularly the history of biochemistry and molecular biology.
Scott A. Strobel is the provost, Henry Ford II professor of molecular biophysics and biochemistry, and a professor of chemistry at Yale University. He was the vice provost for Science Initiatives and vice president for West Campus Planning & Program Development. An educator and researcher, he has led a number of Yale initiatives over the past two decades. Strobel was appointed as Yale's provost in 2020.
Donald Crothers was a professor of chemistry at Yale University in the United States. He was best known for his work on nucleic acid structure and function.
Stephen H. White is an American Biophysicist, academic, and author. He is a Professor Emeritus of Physiology and Biophysics at the University of California, Irvine.
Mark Andrew Lemmon an English-born biochemist, is the Alfred Gilman Professor of Pharmacology at Yale University where he co-directs the Cancer Biology Institute with Joseph Schlessinger and serves as Deputy Director of Yale Cancer Center.
Kalpathy Ramaier Katchap Easwaran is an Indian molecular biophysicist, academic and a former Astra Chair Professor and chairman of the department of molecular biophysics of the Indian Institute of Science. He is known for his contributions in the development of anti-fungal drugs and for his researches on ionophores and ion-transport across membranes. He is an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1984, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Oleg Vladimirovich Krasilnikov was a Soviet-born biophysicist who lived and worked in Uzbekistan and Brazil. His father, Vladimir Sergeyevich Krasilnikov, was a mining engineer who worked in the coal mines of Kyrgyzstan. His mother, Ekatherine Yakovlevna Krasilnikova, was an economist.
Jue Chen is a Chinese-born American structural biologist and biochemist. She is the William E. Ford professor of biochemistry and head of the Laboratory of Membrane Biology and Biophysics at the Rockefeller University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Her research focuses on elucidating the structure and function of ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters.
Jason S. Lewis is a British radiochemist whose work relates to oncologic therapy and diagnosis. His research focus is a molecular imaging-based program focused on radiopharmaceutical development as well as the study of multimodality small- and biomolecule-based agents and their clinical translation. He has worked on the development of small molecules as well as radiolabeled peptides and antibodies probing the overexpression of receptors and antigens on tumors.
Karen Renee Gibson Fleming is a Professor of Biophysics at Johns Hopkins University. She investigates the energetics of transmembrane helix-helix interactions. Fleming was awarded the 2020 Protein Society Carl Brändén Award.
Shuguang Zhang is an American biochemist. He is at the MIT Media Lab's Laboratory for Molecular Architecture. Shuguang Zhang's research focuses on designs of biological molecules, particularly proteins and peptides. He has published over 170 scientific papers, which have cumulatively been cited over 35,000 times with an h-index of 88. On the “Updated science-wide author databases of standardizes citation indicators”, he is ranked 18th worldwide in the field of Biomedical Engineering. Zhang is also a co-founder and board member of Molecular Frontiers Foundation, which organizes annual Molecular Frontiers Symposia in Sweden and around the world. The selected winners are awarded Molecular Frontiers Inquiry Prize.
Kuan Wang is a Taiwanese biochemist whose contributions to muscle biochemistry and cell biology have garnered more than 10,000 citations with an h-index of 54. After receiving a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Taiwan National University, he came to the United States for graduate study and earned a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University under the guidance of Frederic M. Richards. He was an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow (1974–1976) at the University of California, San Diego, in the laboratory of S. J. Singer. In 1977 he joined the Department of Chemistry at the University of Texas at Austin as assistant professor. During his early years at UT, Wang and his co-workers discovered two previously unrecognized high molecular weight proteins of myofibrils, Titin and Nebulin, which fundamentally changed our understanding of muscle sarcomeres.
Bonnie Ann Wallace, FRSC is a British and American biophysicist and biochemist. She is a professor of molecular biophysics in the department of biological sciences, formerly the department of crystallography, at Birkbeck College, University of London, U.K.
