Doolittle set for next Discovery Lecture
Russell Doolittle, Ph.D., internationally recognized for his work on the structure and evolution of proteins, will present the final Discovery Lecture of the spring on Thursday, May 19. His lecture, “Searching for the Roots of Blood Clotting: A Bioinformatics Approach,” begins at 4 p.m. in 208 Light Hall.
Russell Doolittle, Ph.D.
Doolittle is a professor of Molecular Biology at the University of California, San Diego.
To explore the invention and evolution of blood plasma clotting proteins, Doolittle and his team cloned and sequenced a number of these proteins from a primitive vertebrate, the lamprey. Comparison of the lamprey proteins with the corresponding mammalian proteins has offered insights into clotting protein function.
The investigators also crystallized the clotting factor fibrinogen and solved its X-ray structure. This structure-based project is revealing new clues about how clotting works and the origins of clotting factors.
Doolittle is a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a co-recipient of the Paul Ehrlich Prize. His lecture is sponsored by the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Center for Matrix Biology at Vanderbilt University.
For a complete schedule of the Discovery Lecture series and archived video of previous lectures, go to www.mc.vanderbilt.edu/discoveryseries.