Martin Gruebele
James R. Eiszner Endowed Chair in Chemistry;
Professor of Physics and
Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology
Professor Gruebele received his B.S. degree in 1984, and his Ph.D. in 1988 from the University of California at Berkeley. After working as a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology, he joined the faculty of the University of Illinois in 1992. Dr. Gruebele is also a faculty member of the Beckman Institute.
Research
The Gruebele Group is engaged in experiments and computational modeling to study a broad range of fundamental problems in chemical and biological physics. A common theme in these experiments is the implementation of state-of-the-art laser techniques to interrogate and manipulate complex molecular systems, coupled with quantum or classical simulations. The results of these efforts are contributing to a deeper understanding of the way that proteins fold into functional 3-dimensional molecules, the details of how chemical bonds are broken by vibrational motion and how this can be controlled, and the switching of energy flow in large molecular structures on surfaces.Publications
E. Larios and M. Gruebele, "Protein stability at negative pressure", Methods, 52, 51-56 (2010).
E. Berrios, H. Y. Hui and M. Gruebele, "Vibrationally resolved emission of thiophosgene dimer", Chem. Phys. Lett. 497, 163-167 (2010).
S. Ebbinghaus, K. Meister, B. Born, A. DeVries, M. Gruebele and M. Havenith, "Antifreeze glycoprotein activity correlates with long-range protein-water dynamics", J. Am. Chem. Soc. 132, 12210-12211 (2010).
A. Dhar, A. Samiotakis, S. Ebbinghaus, L. Nienhaus, D. Homouz, M. Gruebele, and M. S. Cheung, "Structure, function and folding of phosphoglycerate kinase are strongly perturbed by macromolecular crowding", Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 107, 17586-17591 (2010).
K. Sarkar, D. A. Nguyen and M. Gruebele, "Loop and stem dynamics during RNA hairpin folding and unfolding", RNA 16, 2427-2434 (2010).
A. Dhar, S. Ebbinghaus, Z. Shen, T. Mishra and M. Gruebele, "The diffusion coefficient for PGK folding in eukaryotic cells", Biophys. J. Lett. 99,, L69-L71 (2010).
S. Piana, K. Sarkar, K. Lindorff-Larsen, M. Guo, M. Gruebele and D. E. Shaw, "Computational design and experimental testing of the fastest-folding β-sheet protein," J. Mol. Biol. 405, 43-48 (2010).
G. Scott, S. Ashtekar, J. Lyding and M. Gruebele, "Direct imaging of room temperature optical absorption with subnanometer spatial resolution",Nano Letters 10, 4897-4900 (2010).
E. K. Culyba, J. L. Price, S. R. Hanson, A. Dhar, C-H. Wong, M. Gruebele, E. T. Powers and J. W. Kelly, "Protein native state stabilization by placing aromatic side chains in N-glycosylated reverse turns", Science 331, 571-575 (2011).
S. Ebbinghaus and M. Gruebele, "Protein folding landscapes in the living cell", J. Phys. Chem. Lett. 2, 314-319 (2011).>
M. B. Prigozhin, K. Sarkar, W. C. Swope, M. Gruebele, and J. Pitera, "Reducing lambda repressor to the core",J. Phys. Chem. B 115, 2090-2096 (2011).
P. L. Walters, M. B. Prigozhin, T. Y. Takeshita, L. Xu, F. M. Olivarez and M. Gruebele, "Conformational energy gaps and scaling of conformer density in chain molecules", Chem. Phys. Lett. 507, 15-18 (2011).
D. Anunciado, A. Dhar, M. Gruebele, and A. M. Baranger, "Multistep kinetics of the U1A-SL2 RNA complex formation", J. Mol. Biol. 408, 896-908 (2011).
S. Ashtekar, G. Scott, J. Lyding, and M. Gruebele, "Direct observation of two-state surface dynamics on amorphous silicon", Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 235501 (2011).
A. Dhar, M. Prigozhin, H. Gelman and M. Gruebele, "Studying IDP Stability and Dynamics by Fast Relaxation Imaging in Living Cells",V. Uversky and A. K. Dunker, eds. In Intrinsically Disordered Proteins: Volume I. Experimental Techniques (Springer, Berlin, 2011).
K. Girdhar, G. Scott, Y. Chemla and M. Gruebele, "Better folding thermodynamics from kinetics", J. Chem. Phys. 135, 015102 (2011).
A. Dhar, K. Girdhar, D. Singh, S. Ebbinghaus and M. Gruebele, "Different protein stability and folding kinetics in the nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, and cytoplasm of living cells", Biophys. J. 101, 421-430 (2011).
Awards
- Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2010
- List of Teachers Ranked as Excellent by Their Students, 2010
- Raymond and Beverly Sackler Prize in the Physical Sciences, 2008
- Member, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina
- Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize, von Humboldt Society
- Coblentz Award, Coblentz Society
- Dreyfus New Faculty Award
- NSF National Young Investigator Award
- Packard Fellowship
- Cottrell Scholarship
- Fellow, Center for Advanced Study, UIUC
- A. P. Sloan Fellow
- Camille and Henry Dreyfus Fellow
- University Scholar, UIUC
- Fellow of the American Physical Society
- Associate, Center for Advanced Study
- NSF Creativity Extension Award
- Baker Symposium Lecturer
Highlights
Physics Today News Article (August 2011 issue, page 20) on a "kinder and gentler" way of measuring biomolecule stability.
"Biopsy Breakthough" covered by Debra Pressey for the News Gazette (see http://www.scs.illinois.edu/mgweb/news.html for reprint).
Inside Cover Story in Angewandte Chemie International Edition (p. 6302): S. J. Kim, B. Born, M. Havenith, and M. Gruebele, "Real-time detection of protein-water dynamics upon protein folding by Terahertz absorption spectroscopy," Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 47 (34), 6486-6489 (2008).
