Anastassis Perrakis

As a pre-doctoral fellow at the EMBL-Hamburg laboratory under the supervision of Keith Wilson, I worked on the structures of chitinolytic enzymes, a family of enzymes with high biotechnological interest. Our publications on Chitinase A (Structure, 1994), Chitobiase (Nature Structural Biology, 1995) and their chemical mechanism for chitin hydrolysis (Journal Americal Chemical Society, 1996) have been cited around a thousand times altogether. As an EMBO long term fellow in the group of Titia Sixma at the Netherlands Cancer Institute (NKI), I started a project on the structure determination of the DNA mismatch recognition protein MutS. At the same time I helped to initiate the crystallography infrastructure of the NKI lab, and started my work on wARP which was to lead a couple of years later to the popular ARP/wARP software package for X-ray crystallography. I moved on as a staff scientist in the group of Stephen Cusack at the EMBL-Grenoble, where for three years I participated in a team that built and commissioned the µ-diffractometer at ESRF beamline ID13. I also pursued my post-doctoral work research interests in DNA mismatch repair, and determined the structure of MutS in complex with mismatched DNA, published in Nature in 2000. At the same time we have released the first version of ARP/wARP, the first automated macromolecular model building software for X-ray crystallography; the paper we published in 1999 in Nature Structural Biology has enjoyed more than two thousand citations since.