What is your favourite enzyme, and why?

Prolyl-4-hydroxylase. My first project was on collagen. In collagen, every third amino acid is hydroxyproline, but it’s the only protein in the body with this. Prolyl-4-hydroxylase adds the hydroxyl group. Hydroxyproline makes up 4-5% of all amino acids and it’s the most prevalent post-translational modification, but it’s primarily found in one type of protein!

 

What is your favourite book?

The Melazan Book of the Fallen series by Steven Ericson. It’s beautifully rich.

 

What is the most recent book you’ve read?

Night Without Stars by Peter Hamilton. It’s a great science fiction book.

 

What is your favourite amino acid, and why?

That’s an easy one! Tryptophan, because it’s so useful spectroscopically. It can be used for absorbance, vibrational or fluorescence spectroscopy, labelled with a fluorine for a unique NMR probe, and has other distinctive NMR behaviour. It’s relatively rare, so it’s very specific!

 

What are some of your hobbies?

Right now, it’s all about my kids. I have three boys, ages 4-11, so it’s lots of ferrying them around - not a lot of standalone time.

 

What is your dream vacation?

I’m drawn to northern climates, so somewhere crazy like Greenland or the northern reaches of Canada. I’d love to do some outdoor-type adventures- canoeing, hiking in remote areas- basically anything in rugged, isolated areas.

 

What is the coolest project you’ve ever worked on?

It’s hard to pick favourites! I love my current work with spider silks. We use E. coli to make the 400 amino acid silks. We mutate and modify them, creating liquid cultures that you can pull fibres out of using a pipette. There are still so many interesting questions about what the spider is doing when it’s wrapping it’s prey- we really have no idea!

 

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made in lab?

I was in a fourth year enzymology class and there were 6-8 week series of labs. I was producing an enzyme and in the fifth week I was doing a dialysis and didn’t clip the dialysis bag tightly enough, so I lost everything. I had to do lots of dialysis as a grad student, so I always was sure to clip the bag!

 

Do you have any advice or anything else you want to say?

Pursue what’s fun and interesting to you! Things you succeed with are the things that excite you. Don’t bang your head over things you aren’t excited about- at least it will be important to you!