Ronald T. Raines | |
---|---|
Born | August 13, 1958 66) | (age
Alma mater | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Known for | Research on collagen, ribonucleases, protein chemistry, and biofuels |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Chemical Biology |
Institutions | University of Wisconsin–Madison Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Thesis | Energetics of enzymatic catalysis: Triosephosphate isomerase |
Doctoral advisor | Jeremy R. Knowles |
Other academic advisors | William J. Rutter (postdoctoral) Christopher T. Walsh (undergraduate) |
Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of physical organic chemistry to solve important problems in biology.
Raines was born and raised in the New Jersey suburbs of New York City. His father was a Ph.D. chemist, having worked with Charles O. Beckman at Columbia University. Raines graduated from West Essex High School in North Caldwell, New Jersey, [1] where he was taught by award-winning chemistry teacher, Rex T. Morrison. [2] He received Sc.B. degrees in chemistry and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doing undergraduate research with Christopher T. Walsh on pyridoxal phosphate-dependent enzymes. He earned A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry at Harvard University for work with Jeremy R. Knowles on catalysis by triosephosphate isomerase. Also on his Ph.D. thesis committee were Walter Gilbert and Martin Karplus. Raines was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow with William J. Rutter in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, where he cloned and expressed the gene encoding bovine pancreatic ribonuclease.
Raines was a member of the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1989 until 2017. There, he was the Henry A. Lardy Professor of Biochemistry, Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Biology, and a Professor of Chemistry. [3] In 2009, he was a Visiting Associate in Chemistry at Caltech; in 2014, he was the Givaudan–Karrer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universität Zürich. [4] In 2017, he returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the faculty of his alma mater, MIT. He is also an Extramural Member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and an Associate Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Altogether, he has mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdoctorates. [5]
Raines and his coworkers have made the following contributions.
Raines serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals ACS Chemical Biology ; Bioconjugate Chemistry ; Current Opinion in Chemical Biology; Peptide Science; Protein Engineering, Design & Selection; and Protein Science . He was the Chair of the NIH study section that evaluated grant applications in synthetic and biological chemistry.
Protein tags are peptide sequences genetically grafted onto a recombinant protein. Tags are attached to proteins for various purposes. They can be added to either end of the target protein, so they are either C-terminus or N-terminus specific or are both C-terminus and N-terminus specific. Some tags are also inserted at sites within the protein of interest; they are known as internal tags.
Bovine pancreatic ribonuclease, also often referred to as bovine pancreatic ribonuclease A or simply RNase A, is a pancreatic ribonuclease enzyme that cleaves single-stranded RNA. Bovine pancreatic ribonuclease is one of the classic model systems of protein science. Two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry have been awarded in recognition of work on bovine pancreatic ribonuclease: in 1972, the Prize was awarded to Christian Anfinsen for his work on protein folding and to Stanford Moore and William Stein for their work on the relationship between the protein's structure and its chemical mechanism; in 1984, the Prize was awarded to Robert Bruce Merrifield for development of chemical synthesis of proteins.
David E. Clemmer is an analytical chemist and the Distinguished Professor and Robert and Marjorie Mann Chair of Chemistry at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana, where he leads the Clemmer Group. Clemmer develops new scientific instruments for ion mobility mass spectrometry (IMS/MS), including the first instrument for nested ion-mobility time-of-flight mass spectrometry. He has received a number of awards, including the Biemann Medal in 2006 "for his pioneering contributions to the integration of ion mobility separations with a variety of mass spectrometry technologies."
Morten Peter Meldal is a Danish chemist and Nobel laureate. He is a professor of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen in Copenhagen, Denmark. He is best known for developing the CuAAC-click reaction, concurrently with but independent of Valery V. Fokin and K. Barry Sharpless.
Jeremy Randall Knowles was a professor of chemistry at Harvard University who served as dean of the Harvard University faculty of arts and sciences (FAS) from 1991 to 2002. He joined Harvard in 1974, received many awards for his research, and remained at Harvard until his death, leaving the faculty for a decade to serve as Dean. Knowles died on 3 April 2008 at his home.
Laura Lee Kiessling is an American chemist and the Novartis Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kiessling's research focuses on elucidating and exploiting interactions on the cell surface, especially those mediated by proteins binding to carbohydrates. Multivalent protein-carbohydrate interactions play roles in cell-cell recognition and signal transduction. Understanding and manipulating these interactions provides tools to study biological processes and design therapeutic treatments. Kiessling's interdisciplinary research combines organic synthesis, polymer chemistry, structural biology, and molecular and cell biology.
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David Ruchien Liu is an American molecular biologist and chemist. He is Richard Merkin Professor, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Bradley Lether Pentelute is currently a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His research program lies at the intersection of chemistry and biology and develops bioconjugation strategies, cytosolic delivery platforms, and rapid flow synthesis technologies to optimize the production, achieve site-specific modification, enhance stability, and modulate function of a variety of bioactive agents. His laboratory successfully modified proteins via cysteine-containing “pi-clamps” made up of a short sequence of amino acids, and delivered large biomolecules, such as various proteins and drugs, into cells via the anthrax delivery vehicle. Pentelute has also made several key contributions to automated synthesis technologies in flow. These advances includes the invention of the world's fastest polypeptide synthesizer. This system is able to form amide bonds at a more efficient rate than standard commercial equipment and has helped in the process of understanding protein folding and its mechanisms. This automated flow technology was recently used to achieve total chemical synthesis of protein chains up to 164 amino acids in length that retained the structure and function of native variants obtained by recombinant expression. The primary goal of his endeavor is to use these processes to create designer biologics that can be used to treat diseases and solve the manufacturing problem for on-demand personalized therapies, such as cancer vaccines.
Iwao Ojima is a Japanese-American chemist and university distinguished professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has been widely recognized for his seminal contributions to a range of chemical research at the multifaceted interfaces of chemical synthesis and life sciences. As rare accomplishments, he has received four National Awards from the American Chemical Society in four different fields of research. He is also serving as the director of the Institute of Chemical Biology and Drug Discovery (ICB&DD), as well as the president of the Stony Brook Chapter of the National Academy of Inventors.
Milan Mrksich is an American chemist. He is the Henry Wade Rogers Professor at Northwestern University with appointments in chemistry, biomedical engineering and cell & developmental biology. He also served as both the founding director of the Center for Synthetic Biology and as an associate director of the Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center at Northwestern. Mrksich also served as the Vice President for Research of Northwestern University.
Helma B. Wennemers is a German organic chemist. She is a professor of organic chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
A collagen hybridizing peptide (CHP) is a synthetic peptide sequence with typically 6 to 10 repeating units of the Gly-Xaa-Yaa amino acid triplet, which mimics the hallmark sequence of natural collagens. A CHP peptide usually possesses a high content of proline and hydroxyproline in the Xaa and Yaa positions, which confers it a strong propensity to form the collagen's unique triple helix conformation. In the single-stranded (monomeric) status, the peptide can recognize denatured collagen strands in tissues by forming a hybridized triple helix with the collagen strands. This occurs via the triple helical chain assembly and inter-chain hydrogen bonding, in a manner similar to primers binding to melted DNA strands during PCR. The binding does not depend on a specific sequence or epitope on collagen, enabling CHPs to target denatured collagen chains of different types.
Derek Dek Woolfson is a British chemist and biochemist. He is a professor of chemistry and biochemistry. and director of the Bristol BioDesign Institute at the University of Bristol, and founder of synthetic biology spin-out company Rosa Biotech.
Gabriela S. Schlau-Cohen is a Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor at MIT in the Department of Chemistry.
Alessio Ciulli is an Italian British biochemist. Currently, he is the Professor of Chemical & Structural Biology at the School of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, where he founded and directs Dundee' new Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD). He is also the scientific co-founder and advisor of Amphista Therapeutics.
Jean Baum is an American chemist. She is the distinguished professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, where she is also vice dean for research and graduate education in the school of arts and sciences, and also vice chair of the department of chemistry and chemical biology. Her research investigates protein–protein interaction and protein aggregation using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) and other biochemical and biophysical techniques. She serves as treasurer for the Protein Society.
Yu-Shan Lin is a computational chemist. She is a professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry at Tufts University in the United States. Her research lab uses computational chemistry to understand and design biomolecules, with topics focusing on cyclic peptides, protein folding, and collagen.
Luis Moroder was an Italian peptide chemist, who pioneered research on the interactions between peptide hormones and cell membrane-bound hormone receptors. He later expanded this research to other biological systems of medical relevance such as protein inhibitors, collagens, and synthetic proteins. A hallmark of his research is interdisciplinarity as reflected in his use and development of methods in organic chemistry, biophysics and molecular biology. He was a co-editor of the five-volume Houben-Weyl, Methods of Organic Chemistry, Synthesis of Peptides and Peptidomimetics. From 2008 he was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Peptide Science, the official journal of the European Peptide Society.