Bryn Mawr Chemists Host International Conference on Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzymes

Last June, W. Alton Jones Professor of Chemistry and Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Sharon Burgmayer, drew together an international, interdisciplinary cadre of scholars for the Tenth International Molybdenum and Tungsten Enzyme Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Conference organization assistance was contributed by Chemistry Ph.D. candidate Cassandra Gates and alumni Ben Williams (Ph.D. ’15) and Doug Gisewhite (Ph.D. ’17).

This conference chaired by Professor Burgmayer focused on new research developments in the area of molybdenum and inorganic tungsten enzymes. These metal-containing proteins are critical to the biological processes that sustain life on the planet and that play a crucial role in human health. The conference, the only meeting specifically focused on molybdenum and tungsten in biology, attracted scholars from a wide range of disciplines, such as microbiology, medicinal chemistry, synthetic inorganic model chemistry, spectroscopy, computational modeling, protein crystallography, molecular biology and genetics.

Bryn Mawr’s Doug Gisewhite shared part of his recent dissertation research in his talk “Exploring the reaction chemistry of synthetic pterin-dithiolene architectures.” Additionally, current graduate student Cassie Gates shared some of her own recent contributions in presenting the poster “Exploring molybdenum pterin-dithiolene reaction chemistry.” Recent alum Ben Williams presented a poster describing his research modeling the mARC enzyme at the University of New Mexico.