Annual Symposium

Keynote Abstract - Capturing One-Carbon Chemistry, One-Structural Snapshot at a Time: 

Ni-Fe-S-cluster containing carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH) and acetyl-CoA synthase (ACS) play major roles in the global carbon cycle through the consumption of CO and CO2 gases, the production of acetate, and the breakdown of acetate for methane generation. In this presentation, I will describe my lab's journey to understand the structural basis of one-carbon chemistry at Ni-Fe-S clusters. Our work shows that to perform the biological equivalent of the water-gas shift reaction (CO + H2O ⇔ CO2 + H2) and of the Monsanto process ("syn gas" to acetic acid), CODH/ACS enzymes use internal gas channels and employ dramatic conformational rearrangements. Our goal is to capture structural snapshots of CODH/ACS enzymes in order to visualize how nature produces and consumes greenhouse gases CO2 and methane using organometallic chemistry.

About the Speaker:

Cathy L. Drennan is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Biochemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a Professor and Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. During her AB in chemistry from Vassar College, she worked with Professor Miriam Rossi and discovered her passion for X-ray crystallography and for vitamin B12. But she did not head straight to graduate school, instead teaching high school in West Branch, Iowa, for three years. By day, she taught chemistry, biology, and physics and by night, she staged high school plays, such as The Importance of Being Earnest. Realizing that teaching science and scientific research go hand in hand, Cathy enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Michigan to more fully experience the world of research. Carrying out her graduate studies in biological chemistry with the late Professor Martha L. Ludwig, Cathy used X-ray crystallography to show for the first time how vitamin B12 binds to a protein.

Following postdoctoral studies with Professor Douglas C. Rees at Caltech, Cathy joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her laboratory seeks to understand how nature harnesses and re-directs the reactivity of enzyme metallocenters to perform challenging reactions. By combining X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy with other biophysical methods, the Drennan laboratory’s goal is to “visualize” molecular processes by obtaining snapshots of enzymes in action. Some of the proteins studied are newly characterized, and others have eluded structural characterization due to issues of oxygen sensitivity, conformational flexibility, protein heterogeneity, or structural complexity. The Drennan laboratory has specialized in tackling and solving these more challenging problems in structural biology. In total, Drennan is an author on ~190 publications, over 200 Protein Data Bank submissions, and has given over 200 invited talks. Her research has been featured in the iBIOLOGY online seminar series Metalloproteins in Action.

For twenty of her twenty-five years at MIT, Drennan has taught the large introductory science classes, known as the science General Institute Requirements or GIRs. For fourteen years, she taught 350-person-plus introductory chemistry class 5.111, which is available online on the MIT OCW site and for the past six years, she taught the 250-500-person introductory biology class 7.012. In 2006, Drennan was selected as a “Million Dollar Professor” by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, allowing her to run an education research group (separate from her biochemistry research group) for eight years. As part of her education program, she co-authored a teacher training guide, What Every Teacher and Mentor Should Know: A Guide to Identifying and Reducing Stereotype Threat to Maximize Student Performance and ran workshops based on this material all over the country and produced an online version. She also created classroom material that showcases the importance of chemical principles to solving real world problems and diversity among chemists. Drennan has also spoken in national forums about being dyslexic, including on CBS Sunday Morning and PBS’s RoadTrip Nation. Her goal as an educator is to engender an appreciation for the disciplines of chemistry and biology and to convey that scientists are a diverse group of people. In her own research group, Drennan has trained a total of eighty-eight undergraduate students, forty graduate students, and twenty-two postdocs.

Cathy has been recognized with both teaching and research awards, including MIT’s Baker Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, MIT’s Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award, a Sloan Fellowship, an ASBMB-Schering-Plough Research Institute Scientific Achievement Award, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, a Searle Scholar Award, the Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin Award from the Protein Society and the Rose Award from the ASBMB. She is an AAAS Fellow, an ASBMB Fellow, an ACA Fellow, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Cathy resides with her husband, Boston University Professor Sean J. Elliott, daughter Sammy, labradoodle Casey, and cat Lacie in Newton, Massachusetts.

Past Symposia

View our past annual symposia — learn more about past themes and speakers, download posters from past years' events.