Meet the Editorial Advisory Board

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Abstract

The Editorial Advisory Board of Molecular BioSystems is made up of an international team of enthusiastic scientists whose expertise covers a broad subject range. Here we present profiles of some of the members; others will follow in later issues.

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Shankar Balasubramanian graduated in 1988 with a BA in Natural Sciences and obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 1991, both from the University of Cambridge, UK. He then spent two years as a SERC-NATO Research Fellow in the laboratory of Professor Stephen J Benkovic at The Pennsylvania State University, USA. In 1994 he returned to the Department of Chemistry, University of Cambridge as a Royal Society University Research Fellow and became a Fellow of Trinity College the same year. He was appointed to a University Lectureship in 1998. His research is directed at the study of biomolecules and their role in biological mechanisms using a variety of chemical and biophysical techniques. Systems under study have largely been nucleic acids and enzymes that act on nucleic acids. Recent work has been focused around the four stranded quadruplex DNA structure and telomerase, the non-classical DNA polymerase responsible for maintaining the ends of chromosomes. During the course of this work Dr Balasubramanian has developed and exploited a number of contemporary experimental methods. This has included novel chemical approaches for solid phase organic synthesis and combinatorial chemistry. He has also explored and developed the use of fluorescence spectroscopy and fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) for the study of structure and dynamics of nucleic acids and enzymes. More recently the use of fluorescence spectroscopy at the single molecule level has become a significant part of this work and is presently being applied to biomolecular systems of increasing complexity.

Plate1 Shankar Balasubramanian

Virginia Cornish graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University, USA, with a BA in Biochemistry in 1991, where she did undergraduate research with Professor Ronald Breslow in the Chemistry Department. She then moved west to do research with Professor Peter Schultz in the Chemistry Department at the University of California at Berkeley as an NSF Predoctoral Fellow. In Professor Schultz's laboratory she helped develop a new methodology for incorporating synthetic amino acids into proteins using the protein biosynthetic machinery. In 1996, she became an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in the Biology Department at M.I.T. under the guidance of Professor Robert Sauer. At M.I.T. she initiated an independent project that formed the basis for research in her own laboratory at Columbia. Virginia joined the faculty of the Chemistry Department at Columbia in 1999, where she carries out research at the interface of chemistry and biology, and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2004. Her laboratory brings together modern methods in synthetic chemistry and DNA technology to co-opt biological systems for the synthesis of new materials, understanding the function of these complex biological systems by challenging their specificity at the molecular level. Her research has been recognized by numerous awards including a Sloan Foundation Fellowship, a Beckman Young Investigator Award, and a NSF Career Award.

Plate2 Virginia Cornish

Craig Crews' research focuses on the application of chemical approaches to the study of cell biological questions. He is interested in the syntheses and mode of action studies of biologically active natural compounds with the goal of identifying new biological reagents. Current natural products studied include anti-angiogenic, anti-inflammatory and anti-tumor compounds that target a variety of different cellular pathways to elicit their potent pharmacological activities. An additional line of work in recent years has been the development of a small-molecule technology that targets specific intracellular proteins for proteasome-mediated degradation. He is based at Yale University, USA, in the Department of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology with secondary appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology.

Plate3 Craig Crews

Linda Hsieh-Wilson is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology, USA and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her bachelor's degree in chemistry from Yale University and her PhD degree in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley. She did her postdoctoral work in neurobiology at the Rockefeller University with Professor Paul Greengard. Professor Hsieh-Wilson's research combines organic chemistry and neurobiology to elucidate molecular mechanisms of communication in the brain. Her laboratory is focused on understanding the roles of carbohydrate and other post-translational modifications in regulating the structure and function of neuronal proteins. Hsieh-Wilson's work has demonstrated that a wide variety of neuronal proteins undergo covalent modification, which has implications for a number of fundamental cellular processes, including transcription and neuronal communication. Her honors include a Research Corporation Research Innovation Award, NSF CAREER Award, and Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry. She has also been named a Beckman Young Investigator and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow.

Plate4 Linda Hsieh-Wilson

Rima Kaddurah-Daouk received her education in biochemistry at the American University of Beirut and subsequently trained in molecular biology at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, USA, where she worked with Nobel Laureate Dr Hamilton Smith on the mechanism of protein–DNA recognition. Subsequent training and research at the Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology enabled her to combine biochemical and biological approaches that led to the identification of genes and pathways possibly implicated in cancer biology and neuronal cell survival. She has authored key papers around the concept of energy impairment in disease and has over forty patents and patent applications around her findings. These discoveries enabled the establishment of two biotechnology companies that moved the research from the bench to the clinic. Dr Kaddurah-Daouk is one of the pioneers in the field of metabolomics and plays a leading role in its development. She established the Metabolomics Society and serves as its first president. She also co-founded one of the leading biotechnology companies in the field of metabolomics and is establishing a National Metabolomics Research Network. She is actively involved in organizing meetings and workshops in the field of metabolomics nationally and internationally. She recently joined the faculty at Duke University Medical Center Department of Psychiatry, USA, where she is building several programs that bridge genetic and biochemical global -omics approaches to bring a deeper understanding of pathways implicated in disease and in drug response.

Douglas Kell holds a Research Chair in Bioanalytical Science funded by the RSC and EPSRC in the School of Chemistry at the University of Manchester, UK. His research in systems biology encompasses analytical method development, mathematical modelling and data-intensive machine learning methods, with a particular focus on metabolism and metabolomics and a general interest in the automation of both scientific reasoning and scientific experimentation. Baker's yeast is often used as an experimental object, although increasingly his studies are in mammalian systems. He is Director of the BBSRC/EPSRC-funded Manchester Centre for Integrative Systems Biology that will be largely housed in the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre.

Plate5 Douglas Kell

Anna Mapp's research interests are focused on the development and implementation of chemical approaches for the study of gene transcription. In particular, her research group seeks to understand the contribution of particular protein–protein interactions to the extent, timing, and specificity of transcriptional up-regulation mediated by transcriptional activators. Towards this end her group has developed small molecules and peptides that functionally replace aspects of natural transcriptional regulators via interactions with transcription proteins. These tools are currently being used in cell-based studies to decipher the effects of up-regulating specific genes in various human disease models such as medulloblastoma. This research is carried out at the University of Michigan, USA where she is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Medicinal Chemistry.

Plate6 Anna Mapp

Hisakazu Mihara received his DrSc in Chemistry in 1986 at Kyushu University, Japan, under the direction of Professor Nobuo Izumiya and was then a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of Professor Emil T. Kaiser at the Rockefeller University from 1986 to 1988. He was appointed as an Assistant Professor in Applied Chemistry at Kyushu Institute of Technology in 1988, and promoted to an Associate Professor in Applied Chemistry at Nagasaki University in 1993. Currently, he has been involved in Department of Bioengineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, from 1995. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, and a member of Chemical Society of Japan, the Society of Polymer Science Japan, the Japanese Biochemical Society, Japanese Peptide Society, and American Peptide Society. He is also a member of organizing committees of Japanese Peptide Society and Forum on Biomolecular Chemistry, CSJ. His research interests include peptide design and synthesis, de novo design of artificial proteins, peptide structure–functional relationships including development of peptide microarrays.

Plate7 Hisakazu Mihara

Ben Shen's research interests center on the chemistry, biochemistry and genetics of the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, specifically antibiotics in Streptomyces, and drug discovery and development by combinatorial biosynthesis methods. Blending organic chemistry, biochemistry, and molecular biology, the Shen Lab takes a multidisciplinary approach to study the secondary metabolism by asking the following questions: what reactions are available in nature, what are the enzymatic mechanisms of these reactions, how are these reactions linked to produce complex structures, what are the regulatory mechanisms of these pathways, and, ultimately, how can the nature's biosynthetic machinery be manipulated for natural product structural diversity? He currently holds the Charles M. Johnson Chair in Pharmacy and Professor of Pharmaceutical Sciences in the School of Pharmacy and Professor of Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA.

Plate8 Ben Shen

Brian Shoichet's undergraduate years were spent at MIT and he then received his PhD from UCSF, USA, for work with Tack Kuntz on molecular docking in 1991. Shoichet's postdoctoral research was undertaken with Brian Matthews at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Eugene, Oregon, USA, as a Damon Runyon Fellow. It was mainly experimental and focused on protein structure and stability. Shoichet joined the faculty at Northwestern University, USA, in the Department of Molecular Pharmacology & Biological Chemistry as an Assistant Professor in 1996. He was promoted to a tenured Associate Professor in 2002. He was then recruited back to UCSF, where he is now a Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry. Research in the Shoichet Lab uses computational and experimental techniques to investigate enzyme structure, function, stability and inhibition, and the links among them. It is supported by the NIH.

Plate9 Brian Shoichet

Benjamin Turk's research is aimed at trying to understand how protein modifying enzymes recognize their target substrates and thereby maintain fidelity in cellular signal transduction pathways and regulatory networks. His group develops and applies a range of molecular diversity approaches, including synthetic peptide arrays, phage display libraries, and small molecule screening, to define enzyme–substrate interactions. He is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine.

Plate10 Benjamin Turk

Ian Wilson is a Principal Scientist in the Department of Drug Metabolism and Pharmacokinetics at the AstraZeneca Research site at Alderley Park (Cheshire, UK). Amongst other things he is interested in the development and application of advanced analytical technologies to metabonomics (global metabolite profiling). This work, and the linking of metabonomics with other -omics disciplines such as proteomics and genomics, is being done with a view to obtaining a better understanding of biological systems, especially as they relate to mechanisms of toxicity and disease. He has received a number of awards in separation and analytical science from various organisations including the Royal Society of Chemistry, including most recently the SAC Gold Medal for Analytical Chemistry. He is currently a visiting Professor at the Universities of York, Keele, Sheffield Hallam, Manchester and Imperial College.

Plate11 Ian Wilson

Shao Yao's research interests focus on an area in Chemical Proteomics which he calls “Catalomics”, or the large-scale study of enzymes (and, in future, other catalytic molecules). His research group is particularly interested in the use of various chemical approaches to study different aspects of enzymes, including the development of novel techniques for potential high-throughput identification of enzymes, the detailed study of enzyme reactions and mechanism both in situ and in living cells, and the design, synthesis and screening of biologically interesting molecules which could potential modulate (e.g. activate or inhibit) enzyme activities. He joined the National University of Singapore (NUS) in March, 2001 as an Assistant Professor, and currently holds a joint appointment between the Department of Chemistry and Department of Biological Sciences, NUS.

Plate12 Shao Yao

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