Cynthia J. Burrows

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Cynthia Burrows 2009

Cynthia J. Burrows (born September 23, 1953 in St. Paul, Minnesota ) is an American chemist.

Burrows grew up in Boulder (her father was an electrical engineer) and studied chemistry at the University of Colorado with a bachelor's degree in 1975 and received his PhD from Cornell University in 1982 with Barry Carpenter . As a post-doctoral student , she worked with Jean-Marie Lehn at the University of Strasbourg from 1981 to 1983 . In 1983 she became Assistant Professor, 1989 Associate Professor and 1992 Professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook . From 1995 she was Professor of Chemistry at the University of Utah , from 2007 as Distinguished Professor. She has also been a member of the Huntsman Cancer Institute since 1995 . In 2013 she became the first holder of the Thatcher Presidential Endowed Chair for Biochemistry.

In 1993 and 2002 she was visiting professor in Strasbourg, 1990 at the University of Minnesota and 1989/80 Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science in Okazaki.

Burrows deals with the chemistry of nucleic acids (DNA, RNA). Among other things, she investigated RNA interference ( small interfering RNA ) and oxidation products of guanosine , which play a role in aging processes (oxidative stress) and cancer development (during replication, 8-oxo-guanine leads to mismatches with adenine instead of cytosine, and the duplex can - and quadruplex structure change), especially in the telomeres . There, oxidative stress leads to telomere shortening and aging. Furthermore, this can also lead to connections between proteins and DNA, which she also researches in her laboratory.

Guanine damage through oxidation to 8-oxo-guanine
Detection of DNA damage with current measurement at nanopores in a lipid membrane through which the DNA strand passes. The DNA damage is marked by an electrolyte in a crown ether

In her laboratory she developed a method of localizing and determining DNA and RNA damage using nanopore technology (with alpha-hemolysin as the nanopore).

She also studied the RNA chemistry of the origins of life. She suspects that redox-active bases of RNA like oxidation products of guanosine like 8-oxo-guanosine played the role of co-enzymes like FAD in the early RNA world. Burrows found that photoactivated 8-oxo-guanosine was able to repair mutations caused by UV radiation in the form of thymidine or uracil dimers, so that the origin of redox co-enzymes may be in such repair mechanisms of photoinduced RNA -Damage lay.

She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Chemical Society (2010) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2014) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009). In 2008 she was a Cope Scholar of the ACS and in 2000 the ACS Utah Award. In 2004 she received the Bea Singer Award and in 2014 the Linda K. Amos Award for Outstanding Achievement for Women at the University of Utah. In 2018 she received the Willard Gibbs Medal .

From 2001 to 2013 she was Senior Editor of the Journal of Organic Chemistry. In 2014 she became the main editor of Accounts of Chemical Research .

She is married to chemist Scott Anderson, with whom she has triplets.

Fonts (selection)

  • with Steven E. Rokita: Recognition of guanine structure in nucleic acids by nickel complexes, Accounts of Chemical Research, Volume 27, 1994, pp. 295-301
  • with James G. Miller: Oxidative nucleobase modifications leading to strand scission, Chemical Reviews, Volume 98, 1998, pp. 1109-1152
  • with Paul T. Henderson a. a .: The hydantoin lesions formed from oxidation of 7, 8-dihydro-8-oxoguanine are potent sources of replication errors in vivo, Biochemistry, Volume 42, 2003, pp. 9257-9262
  • Surviving an Oxygen Atmosphere: DNA Damage and Repair, Chapter 8, in: Chemical Evolution II: From the Origins of Life to Modern Society, ACS Symposium Series 1025, 2009
  • with H. Peacock a. a .: Chemical modification of siRNA bases to probe and enhance RNA interference, J. Org. Chem., Vol. 76, 2011, pp. 7295-7300.
  • with An, Fleming, White: Crown ether-electrolyte interactions permit nanopore detection of individual DNA abasic sites in single molecules, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 109, 2012, pp. 11504-11509.
  • mit An, Fleming: Interactions of the human telomere sequence with the nanocavity of the α-hemolysin ion channel reveal structure-dependent electrical signatures for hybrid folds', J. Am. Chem. Soc., Vol. 135, 2013, pp. 8562-8570
  • with An, Fleming, Middleton: Single-molecule investigation of G-quadruplex folds of the human telomere sequence in a protein nanocavity. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, Vol. 111m, 2014, pp. 14325-14331
  • with An, Fleming, White: Nanopore detection of 8-oxoguanine in the human telomere repeat sequence, ACS Nano , Volume 9, 2015, pp. 4296-4307.
  • with Fleming, Ding: Oxidative DNA damage is epigenetic by regulating gene transcription via base excision repair, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Volume 114, 2017, pp. 2604-2609, abstract

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Zhang, Kohler, Burrows et al. a., Efficient UV-induced charge separation and recombination in an 8-oxoguanine-containing dinucleotide, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., Vol. 111, 2014, pp. 11612-11617, abstract
personal data
SURNAME Burrows, Cynthia J.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH September 23, 1953
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Paul, Minnesota