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Linda Nicholson is a Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell University. Her major research focus is on investigating the relationships between protein dynamics and function in the context of the cell and organism. Utilizing NMR spectroscopy as her primary research tool, she measures the internal motions of individual bonds within proteins. NMR is a powerful method for extracting the amplitudes and time scales of motion at atomic resolution, facilitating the detection of motions across a wide range of time scales from picoseconds to hours. Through her studies, she has learned that ligand binding events can communicate information from the protein/ligand interface to remote regions of the protein, where the overall protein structure significantly contributes to binding energetics. Her research has primarily focused on proteins involved in disease processes like the proto-oncoprotein Src and proteins related to Lyme's disease and Alzheimer's disease. Currently, her work extends into thermodynamics and kinetics to obtain a comprehensive picture of the energy landscape of proteins, particularly studying proline isomerization switches that link innate immunity signaling to the regulation of the actin cytoskeleton.
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