Where (tiny) form follows function
Rachelle Gaudet will forgive you if you mistake the colorful, spaghetti-like shapes displayed in six small framed pictures on her office wall for modern art. That’s because Gaudet, a professor of molecular and cellular biology (MCB), also sees beauty in the images, which depict proteins whose structures were worked out by two of Gaudet’s mentors, Paul Sigler at Yale and Don Wiley at Harvard. Today, Gaudet, students, and fellows in her Northwest Building laboratory specialize in structural biology, studying how form influences function in large biological molecules. In nature, several factors can influence how a molecule behaves. The most basic involves the atoms that make up the molecule. A molecule made of oxygen and hydrogen will behave differently, for example, than one made up of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon. But a molecule’s physical structure also can be important, particularly in the case of biological molecules such as proteins, which contain thousands of atoms....