个人简介

Bowie got hooked on proteins at an early age and never looked back. The obsession began as a high school student when he did a research project on blood clotting enzymes with Kenneth G. Mann at the Mayo Clinic in his hometown of Rochester, MN. The research project won him a trip to the International Science and Engineering fair and a Westinghouse Award, experiences that further stimulated his interest in science. He went on to Carleton College, where he got a B. A. degree in Chemistry with Distinction. He did research in carbohydrate chemistry with Gary R. Gray at the University of Minnesota before entering graduate school at M.I.T. There he returned to proteins in the laboratory of Robert T. Sauer, using experimental and computational methods to probe and predict protein structure. After completing his Ph.D. work, he did postdoctoral work with David Eisenberg at UCLA, continuing work on structure prediction and structure determination by x-ray crystallography. He joined the UCLA faculty in 1993 and is now a full professor.

研究领域

Biochemistry/Biophysics/Structural and Computational Biology/Systems Biology and Biological Regulation/Bioenergy and the Environment/Analytical

Protein folding is a fundamental process of life with important implications throughout biology. Elaborate mechanisms exist to regulate and assist folding. Moreover, tens of thousands of mutations have now been associated with diseases and it is thought that most of these mutations affect protein folding and trafficking rather than function. Consequently, there has been an enormous effort over the years to understand how proteins fold. Essentially all of the effort has been directed at soluble proteins, however, and membrane proteins have been largely shunted aside. The lack of effort has not occurred because membrane proteins are unimportant or uninteresting, but because of the great technical challenges they present. It is a challenge that we must overcome if we ever hope to understand membrane biology and disease mechanisms involving a large fraction of the protein universe. We are working to understand folding mechanisms and to develop techniques to study folding and expand the field.

近期论文

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Opgenorth PH, Korman TP, Bowie JU A synthetic biochemistry module for production of bio-based chemicals from glucose. Nat. Chem. Biol.. Apr 2016. :. 2016 PMID: 27065234 10.1038/nchembio.2062 Spielmann M, Kakar N, Tayebi N, Leettola C, Nürnberg G, Sowada N, Lupiáñez DG, Harabula I, Flöttmann R, Horn D, Chan WL, Wittler L, Yilmaz R, Altmüller J, Thiele H, van Bokhoven H, Schwartz CE, Nürnberg P, Bowie JU, Ahmad J, Kubisch C, Mundlos S, Borck G Exome sequencing and CRISPR/Cas genome editing identify mutations of ZAK as a cause of limb defects in humans and mice. Genome Res.. Feb 2016. 26(2):183-91. 2016 PMID: 26755636 Sherkhanov S, Korman TP, Clarke SG, Bowie JU Production of FAME biodiesel in E. coli by direct methylation with an insect enzyme. Sci Rep. 2016. 6:24239. 2016 PMID: 27053100