Jane
S. Richardson, the James
B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at
Duke University, will speak on “Bioinformatics in 3D” on Monday,
April 21, at 5 p.m. in the
F.W. Olin Center
Auditorium.
The talk by Richardson, who is
visiting Union through the Phi Beta Kappa Visiting
Scholar Program, is free and open to the public.
Now that entire genome sequences
are known for many organisms, the challenge is to understand their
commonalities and differences, the evolutionary processes that brought them
there, and especially the interactions and functional consequences of these
genes.
Since selection acts almost entirely on the
expressed proteins rather than the DNA and since the 3D structure is what
confers biological function on those proteins, a crucial part of the current
bioinformatics challenge involves the determination, comparison, and functional
analysis of 3D protein structure. At the simplest level, the patterns of
conservation seen at individual amino-acid positions yield extra information,
and some surprises, when their structural roles are considered.
Jane Richardson and her husband
have worked together for nearly 40 years on research to understand the 3D structure
of protein molecules. Richardson
pioneered ribbon drawings for representing protein structures. She first
described many of the common features of overall folds and their local motifs and
has been active in spreading molecular 3D literacy.
She earned a B.A. degree from Swarthmore
College, and without the benefit of
a Ph. D., has become a biochemist, a MacArthur
fellow, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. She
received the Emily M. Gray Award of the Biophysical Society in 2001.