INTERVIEW

Shoshana Wodak

Interviewed by Julie Clayton

This article also appears in BioMedNet's Conference Reporter.

Posted May 11, 2001 · Issue 102

Background

Biography
Shoshana Wodak did her undergraduate studies in physical chemistry at the University of Brussels in Belgium, followed by a Ph.D. in biophysics at Columbia University in the U.S., where she specialized in molecular modeling, molecular graphics, and protein modeling. In 1974 she returned to Europe to spend two years at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. She then moved full circle back to the University of Brussels to establish one of the first molecular graphics and protein modeling labs in Europe, where she is now a professor. She is also an active promoter of bioinformatics, and has a joint position with the European Bioinformatics Institute's outpost at Hinxton in Cambridge, U.K.

What event led you into research?

Since childhood I had always been fascinated by science. During my undergraduate [studies] I had always hoped to do something at the crossroads of physics and medicine. Biophysics didn't exist at the time, so I invented my own curriculum at MIT.

There I met Cyrus Levinthal - he's quite famous now for the Levinthal paradox. He was the first to develop molecular graphics - he was the father of it, together with Bob Langridge at MIT. They had the first interactive graphics tools for trying to solve the protein-folding problem. The paradox is that there are so many degrees of freedom in the protein, that to search for all of them would take the age of the universe. So how can that be? Many people have tried to explain how a protein can still find its global minimum, or folded state, in a reasonable time. In the last 10 or 15 years he has been extensively cited on that. I did my Ph.D. with him, but he died, unfortunately, about eight years ago.

Is he the one who has most inspired your work?

Levinthal did inspire me quite a bit. His approach was very interdisciplinary. He was a physicist who went into biology. He definitely inspired me with his broad outlook. I had been collaborating for nearly 20 years with Joel Janin in Paris. He's quite a remarkable figure, also. He has a very profound knowledge of physical chemistry and thermodynamics. We've done a lot of work on protein-protein interactions together. When I came back from the States I hooked up with him directly, which has been extremely fruitful for me. These two people have really influenced my career over very many years.

Who awarded you your first grant?

EMBO [the European Molecular Biology Organization], that's an important point. I got an EMBO fellowship to come back from the U.S.

How did you combine running two groups - in Cambridge and Brussels?

When the EBI [European Bioinformatics Institute] was founded in 1995, I joined as a part-time group leader. I was hesitating about moving over there but I ended up keeping both posts. I had a group of about eight people at the EBI, and my group here in Brussels, and that went on for about three or four years. It was very hectic, but I got to cruising speed thanks to portable computers. The distance is not so immense: it's three hours door-to-door, so it was very doable.

What was your best experiment?

I was never really convinced that anything I was doing was very useful! I just have an intuitive approach. In my work with Joel Janin we tried to predict conformational change in a very complex system with hemoglobin binding oxygen. It turned out to be very close to what experimental people have also come up with. This vindicated a whole line of approach that we had used. It was severely criticized, and was refused in the good journals. We ended up publishing it in a less high-profile journal. The experimental people in the U.S. found out about the publication nevertheless, and wrote up a PNAS paper [in 1991] that explained what we did.

What are your current research interests?

We are interested in the automatic design of amino acid sequences of protein backbones. We want to develop a general automatic tool to redesign sequences to fold into a given structure. The application of this would be the redesign of protein sequences, for example to improve the interaction at the interface with other proteins - this would be quicker than by directed evolution.

What are the qualities of a successful researcher?

Boundless energy and boundless optimism! Also, sound judgement. And you have to be resourceful. Another important quality is that you have to manage people. This is something we are not prepared for in science, yet sometimes it's even more important than scientific skills.

Which other scientist, past or present, would you most like to work with?

Joel Janin, again, and younger scientists.

Julie Clayton is a science journalist who trained originally in the fields of cancer and immunology research. After working as a writer and editor at the journal Nature she joined the BBC and produced science and natural history TV programs. She has now moved into website production for the BBC, based in Bristol, UK, and continues to freelance, including work for New Scientist magazine.