If you peruse any of the increasingly bulkier biochemistry textbooks you will notice that a large portion of the reactions depicted correspond mechanistically to transesterifications. Typically in these reactions, nucleophilic attacks are responsible for the breaking and forming of bonds at the catalytic site of the enzyme/substrate transient complex. Yet, something does not look quite […]
阿列尔·费尔南德斯（Ariel Fernandez，出生名 阿列尔·费尔南德斯·斯提格里亚诺, 出生于1957年4月18日）是一位阿根廷–美国双重国籍的物理化学家[1]，1984年在耶鲁大学获化学物理专业博士学位，曾在马克思-普朗克研究所在诺奖得主Manfred Eigen和Robert Huber的指导下从事博士后研究，后在美国莱斯大学任Karl F. Hasselmann讲座讲授，期间曾指导来自两名中国的留学生张曦和陈建平的博士学位论文，2011年从莱斯大学退休后开始在瑞士的巴塞尔学院继续从事研究工作，同时创建咨询公司Ariel Fernandez Consultancy和AF Innovation为企业提供咨询服务。 阿列尔·费尔南德斯 职业生涯 阿列尔•费尔南德斯多个领域的顶级学术期刊上发表文章，包括：代数、动力系统理论、统计力学、化学物理、界面现象、药物设计、癌症治疗和结构生物学视角下的分子进化。他的部分发表成果被收录在Google Scholar Citations和ResearchGate。他曾在国际重要期刊上发表过350篇学术论文，包括：Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, Annual Reviews of Genetics, Nature, Physical Review Letters, Genome Research，其科研成果曾被 Nature, Nature Reviews Drug Design, Chemistry World (UK Royal Society), Scientific American等著名期刊评述。阿列尔•费尔南德斯著有一部学术著作，持有两个药物治疗方面的专利。 阿列尔•费尔南德斯在药物设计领域的一部分最重要的研究成果属于转化医学。他建立了被称之为dehydron的物理化学模型用于描述蛋白质分子的一种结构奇点，并将此模型用于进行药物特异性筛选从而设计更为安全的药物。基于dehydron理论，阿列尔•费尔南德斯发明了分子工程中的“包裹技术”（wrapping technology）。“包裹技术”让药物设计人员能够根据蛋白质靶点的dehydron分布特点来设计药物，从而达到更好的特异性。“包裹技术”及其应用在阿列尔•费尔南德斯的著作“Transformative Concepts for Drug Design: Target Wrapping”(Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2010)中有详细描述。 […]
The recently awarded US patent number 9051387 describes the first therapeutic disruption of a protein-protein association using a rationally designed man-made ligand, a challenge considered the holy grail in drug discovery. This invention by Richard Moss and Ariel Fernandez provides basically a treatment of heart failure. At the molecular level, the effect of the drug is […]
A new book by Ariel Fernandez has made its appearance on April 21, 2015. It is entitled “Biomolecular Interfaces: Interactions, Functions and Drug Design“. The publication particulars are: Hardcover: 372 pages Publisher: Springer; 2015 edition (April 21, 2015) Language: English ISBN-10: 3319168495 ISBN-13: 978-3319168494 Author: Ariel Fernandez Author Companies: Ariel Fernandez Consultancy; AF Innovation Author […]
Interview reproduced from Science Transparency. Ariel Fernandez (also styled as Ariel Fernandez Stigliano) is a physical chemist and mathematician and the former Karl F. Hasselmann Endowed Chair Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. He got his Ph. D. in record time from Yale University under the guidance of Oktay Sinanoglu (who recently passed away according to Yale News). Completed in less than two […]
Dehydrons are disruptive structural defects in proteins in the form of solvent-exposed backbone hydrogen bonds. Dehydrons create interfacial tension and promote their own dehydration, hence they play a central role as determinants of protein associations. Recently, Ariel Fernández has shown that dehydrons are also vital components of the enzymatic apparatus [Ariel Fernandez: COMMUNICATION: Chemical functionality […]
The peer review system is broken. Every working scientist who submits grant proposals and publishes papers knows it. Of my 350 or so papers spanning 32 years of scientific career, I can recall at most a dozen occasions where I sincerely felt compelled to thank the referee for his/her helpful and illuminating comments. As for […]
AS DARWIN’S COMPELLING DISCOURSE on evolution and natural selection gained a firm ground in the scientific imagination, researchers felt they were ready to address the next grand challenge: the origin of life on earth. Yet, I will argue, they plunged into the problem haphazardly and prematurely. Not surprisingly, their efforts were misguided by the lack […]
Here I am concerned with a solution to the protein folding problem that relies solely on the first principles of physics. These principles govern the solvent-mediated exploration of conformation space by a self-interacting protein chain. Strikingly, such a solution remains nearly as elusive as the first day the problem was posed. This surely has to […]
STRUCTURE-BASED DRUG DESIGN, that is the engineering of therapeutic ligands guided by the structure of the target proteins, has met a modest degree of success so far. Part of the problem relates to the difficulty in incorporating induced folding, the unpredictable structural adaptation of the target protein to the drug upon association. The mere existence […]
Ariel Fernandez's Rocky Biophysics 