User:Pendragoness

I graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon majoring in biochemistry and molecular biology and am pursuing a PhD at The University of Texas at Austin in organic chemistry.

I'm interested in biological & chemical sciences, namely bioorganic chemistry, chemical biology, enzymology, synthetic organic chemistry, and biochemistry. At Reed, my undergraduate thesis work focused on the purification of an enzyme with unusual homology proposed to perform an oxidative biotransformation in an aminocyclitol biosynthetic pathway. My PhD work will be studying polyketide synthases. I'm fascinated natural products are biosynthesized, namely polyketides, although other secondary metabolites as well. Mainly I'm fascinated by the fact that nature has managed to effect chemistry so efficiently, in aqueous, physiological conditions with such complexity and I'm interested in figuring out the rules for this at the molecular level.

In the past I have edited pages on Joni Mitchell's work (both the main page and album pages), I created the page on Virginia Woolf's novel Flush, and corrected several minor typos. I also frequently correct chemical schemes containing errors by re-drawing them on ChemDraw as a way to procrastinate my homework. Recent chemical diagram contributions have included the scheme for nitric oxide synthase and for showing the paramethyoxy benzyl protecting (PMB) of an alcohol found on the benzyl page.