Stephen Cusack | |
|---|---|
 Cusack in 2015 | |
| Born | Stephen Anthony Cusack |
| Alma mater | Imperial College London |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | European Molecular Biology Laboratory |
| Thesis | Electron Density and Pair Correlation Functions in Metals (1976) |
| Website | embl |
Stephen Anthony Cusack is a British biologist who is the former Head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) site in Grenoble, France. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]
Cusack was educated at Imperial College London where he was awarded a PhD in 1976 for research on the Radial distribution function and electron density in metals. [8] [9] [10] [11]
Cusack was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. His certificate of election reads:
Stephen Cusack is internationally renowned for major contributions in three areas. He has elucidated the structure and function of protein-RNA complexes involved in RNA maturation, translation and pattern recognition. These are exemplified by work on amino acyl tRNA synthetases, crucial to protein synthesis in all living organisms and analyses of the innate immune recognition of pathogens. As head of the EMBL outstation in Grenoble he has played a pioneering role in the development of instrumentation for structural biology at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, benefiting the structural biology community throughout Europe, and he has recently played a wider role in Europe as a founder of the Instruct project. He has in addition made a series of seminal advances in our understanding of the structure and life cycle of viruses, with particular focus on therapeutic potential. [1]
In 1998, Cusack was elected as a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization. [12]
In condensed matter physics and materials science, an amorphous solid is a solid that lacks the long-range order that is characteristic of a crystal. The terms "glass" and "glassy solid" are sometimes used synonymously with amorphous solid; however, these terms refer specifically to amorphous materials that undergo a glass transition. Examples of amorphous solids include glasses, metallic glasses, and certain types of plastics and polymers.
Structural biology, as defined by the Journal of Structural Biology, deals with structural analysis of living material at every level of organization.
An aminoacyl-tRNA synthetase, also called tRNA-ligase, is an enzyme that attaches the appropriate amino acid onto its corresponding tRNA. It does so by catalyzing the transesterification of a specific cognate amino acid or its precursor to one of all its compatible cognate tRNAs to form an aminoacyl-tRNA. In humans, the 20 different types of aa-tRNA are made by the 20 different aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases, one for each amino acid of the genetic code.
Biological small-angle scattering is a small-angle scattering method for structure analysis of biological materials. Small-angle scattering is used to study the structure of a variety of objects such as solutions of biological macromolecules, nanocomposites, alloys, and synthetic polymers. Small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) and small-angle neutron scattering (SANS) are the two complementary techniques known jointly as small-angle scattering (SAS). SAS is an analogous method to X-ray and neutron diffraction, wide angle X-ray scattering, as well as to static light scattering. In contrast to other X-ray and neutron scattering methods, SAS yields information on the sizes and shapes of both crystalline and non-crystalline particles. When used to study biological materials, which are very often in aqueous solution, the scattering pattern is orientation averaged.
The European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) is an intergovernmental organization dedicated to molecular biology research and is supported by 29 member states, two prospect member states, and one associate member state. EMBL was created in 1974 and is funded by public research money from its member states. Research at EMBL is conducted by more than 110 independent research groups and service teams covering the spectrum of molecular biology.
In the mitochondrion, the matrix is the space within the inner membrane. The word "matrix" stems from the fact that this space is viscous, compared to the relatively aqueous cytoplasm. The mitochondrial matrix contains the mitochondrial DNA, ribosomes, soluble enzymes, small organic molecules, nucleotide cofactors, and inorganic ions.[1] The enzymes in the matrix facilitate reactions responsible for the production of ATP, such as the citric acid cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, oxidation of pyruvate, and the beta oxidation of fatty acids.
Venkatraman Ramakrishnan is a British-American structural biologist. He shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Thomas A. Steitz and Ada Yonath for research on the structure and function of ribosomes.
Patrick Cramer is a German chemist, structural biologist, and molecular systems biologist. In 2020, he was honoured to be an international member of the National Academy of Sciences. He became president of the Max Planck Society in June 2023.
Volker Heine FRS is a New Zealand / British physicist. He is married to Daphne and they have three children. Volker Heine is considered a pioneer of theoretical and computational studies of the electronic structure of solids and liquids and the determination of physical properties derived from it.
The coherent potential approximation (CPA) is a method, in theoretical physics, of finding the averaged Green's function of an inhomogeneous system. The Green's function obtained via the CPA then describes an effective medium whose scattering properties represent the averaged scattering properties of the disordered system being approximated. It is often described as the 'best' single-site theory for obtaining the averaged Green's function. It is perhaps most famous for its use in describing the physical properties of alloys and disordered magnetic systems, although it is also a useful concept in understanding how sound waves scatter in a material which displays spatial inhomogeneity. The coherent potential approximation was first described by Paul Soven, and its application in the context of calculations of the electronic structure of materials was pioneered by Balász Győrffy.
Dame Janet Maureen Thornton, is a senior scientist and director emeritus at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). She is one of the world's leading researchers in structural bioinformatics, using computational methods to understand protein structure and function. She served as director of the EBI from October 2001 to June 2015, and played a key role in ELIXIR.
Tyrosine—tRNA ligase, also known as tyrosyl-tRNA synthetase is an enzyme that is encoded by the gene YARS. Tyrosine—tRNA ligase catalyzes the chemical reaction
SARS and cytoplasmic seryl-tRNA synthetase are a human gene and its encoded enzyme product, respectively. SARS belongs to the class II amino-acyl tRNA family and is found in all humans; its encoded enzyme, seryl-tRNA synthetase, is involved in protein translation and is related to several bacterial and yeast counterparts.
Paul Reinhard Schimmel is an American biophysical chemist and translational medicine pioneer.
Anthony Arie Hyman is a British scientist and director at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics.
Alexander George Bateman is a computational biologist and Head of Protein Sequence Resources at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), part of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Cambridge, UK. He has led the development of the Pfam biological database and introduced the Rfam database of RNA families. He has also been involved in the use of Wikipedia for community-based annotation of biological databases.
Christine Anne Orengo is a Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) known for her work on protein structure, particularly the CATH database. Orengo serves as president of the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), the first woman to do so in the history of the society.
Kiyoshi Nagai was a Japanese structural biologist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology Cambridge, UK. He was known for his work on the mechanism of RNA splicing and structures of the spliceosome.
Leonid A. Sazanov is a professor at the Institute of Science and Technology Austria (ISTA). Sazanov research explores the structure and function of large membrane protein complexes from the domain of bioenergetics. These molecular machines interconvert redox energy and proton motive force across biological membranes using a variety of mechanisms.
Xiang-Lei Yang (杨湘磊) is a Chinese-born American molecular biologist. She is a professor at The Scripps Research Institute, located in La Jolla, California. Her work has contributed to the establishment of physiological importance of aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases beyond their classical role in supporting mRNA translation and their disordered processes that contribute to disease. She founded the Translation Machinery in Health and Disease Gordon Research Conference, an ongoing biannual international conference since 2015. She helped co-found aTyr Pharma, a Nasdaq-listed biotechnology company.
