Ronald T. Raines

Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Henry Lardy Professor of Biochemistry and a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Education

Raines graduated in 1976 from West Essex High School in North Caldwell, New Jersey. He received Sc.B. degrees in chemistry and biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doing undergraduate research with Christopher T. Walsh. He earned A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in chemistry at Harvard University with Jeremy R. Knowles, the title of his doctoral thesis being Energetics of Enzymatic Catalysis: Triosephosphate Isomerase. He was a Helen Hay Whitney postdoctoral fellow^[1] in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco with William J. Rutter. He joined the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1989, and was a Visiting Associate in Chemistry at Caltech in 2009.

Career

Raines has had a wide-ranging impact on science at the interface of chemistry and biology. His efforts have led to both profound understanding and real-world applications, as summarized below.

• Revelation of the basis for the conformational stability of collagen, which is the most abundant protein in animals.^[2] This work led Raines to discover a new chemical force—the n→π* interaction—that contributes to the stability of nearly every protein. His hyperstable collagens are in preclinical trials as wound-healing agents.
• Discovery of how to endow an otherwise innocuous human RNA-cleaving enzyme with toxicity that is specific for cancer cells.^[3] His ribonuclease is in a human clinical trial as an anti-cancer agent.
• Mechanistic insight on cellular redox homeostasis^[4] and on imperatives for the uptake of cationic proteins and peptides by mammalian cells.^[5]
• Invention of efficient chemical processes to synthesize proteins^[6] and to convert crude biomass into useful fuels and chemicals, and fluorogenic probes to image the uptake of molecules into living cells.^[7]

Raines is an author of more than 250 peer-reviewed journal articles,^[8] which have been cited more than 10,000 times, and an inventor on over 25 U.S. patents. He has delivered more than 200 invited lectures in over 20 countries. He is a founder of Quintessence Biosciences, Inc.^[9] and Hyrax Energy, Inc.,^[10] and he serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals ACS Chemical Biology; Peptide Science; Protein Engineering, Design & Selection; and Protein Science; and on the scientific advisory board of the Keystone Symposia.^[11]

References

External links

• The Raines laboratory website
• Quintessence Biosciences, Inc.

Sources

• Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin–Madison
• Department of Chemistry, University of Wisconsin–Madison