Prof. Karsten Theis joins editorial board of 3D encyclopedia

Karsten Theis, Ph.D., associate professor of Chemical & Physical Sciences, recently joined the editorial board of Proteopedia, the free, collaborative 3D-encyclopedia of proteins & other molecules (ISSN 2310-6301). “This is an international effort to explain life at the atomic level to students without barriers of technology or cost,” said Dr. Theis. The 10 members of the board are based in Israel, Spain, and the U.S. Proteopedia’s mission is to “collect, organize and disseminate structural and functional knowledge about protein, RNA, DNA, and other macromolecules, and their assemblies and interactions with small molecules, in a manner that is relevant and broadly accessible to students and scientists.”

During the spring 2018 semester, students in Dr. Theis’s biochemistry course recreated publication-quality three-dimensional figures. http://proteopedia.org/wiki/index.php/Garman_lab:_Interconversion_of_lysosomal_enzyme_specificities Based on results in the literature, and Dr. Theis assembled the figures into three Proteopedia pages, which are available to the public. The students and Westfield State University are acknowledged in the first paragraph:

“The project with the students had an international aspect as well because the researchers we were featuring have their labs in South Africa, the U.S., and Germany, respectively,” Dr. Theis explained. “This fall, we are doing a follow-up article on the work of the Kisker lab because they have a new paper out which extends their findings into the field of drug discovery.”