Chemistry Faculty:
Robert A. Scott, Ph.D.
Distinguished Research Professor
Phone: 706-542-2240
E-mail: scott@chem.uga.edu
Biographical Information
B. S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1975
Ph.D., California Institute of Technology, 1980
NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship, Stanford University, 1980-1981
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois, 1981-1987
Research Interests
Research projects in the Scott group take advantage of biophysical tools to provide molecular information about biological systems. For example, we use x-ray absorption spectroscopy (which uses synchrotron radiation as an intense tunable source of hard x-rays) to provide direct local structural information about metal sites in proteins and enzymes. We also use structural biology tools such as NMR and crystallography to determine the overall structures of some of these proteins. We can then correlate structural changes in the active site with enzymatic function.
Our group also takes full advantage of modern molecular biology tools (e.g., recombinant DNA technology) to probe the influence of protein residue interactions on metalloprotein properties. For example, we investigate the metal-binding properties of a sequence motif that occurs in proteins involved in heavy metal resistance and metal transport systems. We are using mutagenesis to explore the protein determinants of metal-binding specificity in these motifs
More recent interests concern the molecular topography of the transcription pre-initiation complex in the marine hyperthermophilic archaeon, Pyrococcus furiosus. We use labeling techniques to study protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions in the promoter regions of genes in the archaeal genome. Proteomics technologies are also employed to investigate archaeal transcriptional regulation.
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Publications