Holly Atkinson
Graduate Student
Program in Biological and Medical Informatics
Research Summary
My research focus is the integration of structure and sequence information in phylogenomic methods for exploring the structure-function relationship in enzymes and other types of proteins. I am a graduate student in the Babbitt Group.
Glutathione transferases (GSTs) are ubiquitous scavengers of toxic electrophilic compounds that fall, structurally and functionally, within the thioredoxin fold suprafamily. I am working on identifying and explaining how modular substructures in GSTs enable a broad spectrum of catalytic activity through the explicit linkage of chemical capabilities to structural features. These structure-function units can be observed at the level of quaternary structure changes and gross domain rearrangements differentiating superfamilies and fundamental catalytic reactions, as well as in the residue substitutions leading to differing GST specificity profiles. I hope to demonstrate why the thioredoxin fold is so successful by showing how key structural changes allow these proteins to occupy distinct functional niches.
Additional information on my research is available on my personal website.
Background
I was born and bred in Seattle, Washington, and naturally ended up at the U. of Washington for my undergrad degree in Cell and Molecular Biology, completed in 2003. I am a big fan of animals, Cafe du Nord, and David Foster Wallace.
