Angela Gronenborn
Background
Angela M. Gronenborn is a biophysicist researching HIV pathogenesis as the Rosalind Franklin Chair at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in addition to her role as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Structural Biology. Dr. Gronenborn traces her roots far from Pittsburgh, to Cologne, Germany, where she completed her education from primary school to PhD. Prior to beginning her undergraduate studies in physics and biology at the University of Cologne, she intended to study mathematics but was dissuaded by both her father and her high school principal despite her excellence in the subject. Because she did not ultimately want to use a degree in mathematics to become a teacher, she would not have been able to earn a living as a mathematician due to her gender. After receiving her bachelor's degree in 1972, Gronenborn pursued a master's degree in chemistry, which she received in 1975. Her PhD studies focused on comparing coupling constants of aromatic N-oxides that were experimentally derived using 13C Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to those calculated via quantum mechanics (Kramer, 2008).
Dr. Gronenborn was accepted into a Postdoc program away from Cologne at the National Institute for Medical Research (NIMR) with the Medical Research Council located in London, where she aimed to solve the structures of protein-DNA complexes using NMR. After completing her postdoc. Gronenborn was employed as a staff member until 1984, when she went back home to Germany and was employed as head of the biological NMR group at the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Munich. Her NMR group followed her to the National Institute of Health's Division of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases as the head of structural biology. From 2018-2019, Dr. Gronenborn assumed the position of President of the Biophysical Society, and has since continued with her work at the University of Pittsburgh through NIH funding at the Center for HIV Protein Interactions (Kramer, 2008).
Research Focus
Along with her group, Dr. Gronenborn has elucidated the structures of biologically important proteins, including transcription factors and associated complexes, along with chemokines, cytokines, and HIV-associated proteins. The Center for HIV Protein Interactions is tasked with discovering the mechanism behind HIV's hijacking of host cells for replication. She hopes to decode the interactions between HIV's interaction with human immune system cells through determining the molecular structures of viral proteins. Hopefully, these structures will assist in the development of drug targets for HIV and reduce HIV's danger to the human immune system. Using NMR, researchers are allowed insight into how proteins interact to changes in their environment. The current approach of HIV drugs targets single proteins created by the virus, but newer methods focus on uncovering the structures of complexes that two or more virus-created proteins form to discover sites where protein interactions occur, as these sites are vulnerable and useful for drug targeting. Using this method, HIV viral molecules could be prevented from replicating without harming human cells. Researchers hope to combine x-ray crystallography and NMR-related techniques using cryo-electron microscopy to discover the sites of complex interactions (Kramer, 2008; Phelan, 2020).
References
Kramer, D. (2008, February 1). Physics meets biology at new HIV structural biology centers. Physics Today. From https://physicstoday.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1063/1.2883903.
Phelan, L. (2020, June 12). Angela M. Gronenborn. The Biophysical Society. From https://www.biophysics.org/profiles/angela-m-gronenborn.
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