Angela Gronenborn is a trained physicist, with a specialty in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. But when her biologist brother started working on cellular proteins, she decided she’d put her NMR skills to work helping to figure out the structures of protein–DNA complexes. “That’s when people said I was crazy,” she states.
Nowadays, Gronenborn is the principal investigator at the University of Pittsburgh Center for HIV Protein Interactions, one of three HIV structural biology centers that were established in August 2007 with $54 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Fully half of the researchers who are affiliated with the center were trained as chemists or physicists, she says. The major tools the center is using in the quest to understand the mechanisms by which HIV infects human host cells and hijacks them to replicate itself originated from the physical sciences. By elucidating the molecular structure of the...
