Current Protocols Editorial Board: Nucleic Acid Chemistry

	Martin Egli Martin Egli studied chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zürich, Switzerland. He obtained his doctorate in organic chemistry and chemical crystallography in 1988 from the Laboratory for Organic Chemistry at the same institution, working with Vladimir Prelog and Jack D. Dunitz. After a postdoctoral position with Alexander Rich at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Habilitation studies at ETH-Zürich, he became Assistant Professor in Molecular Pharmacology and Biological Chemistry at Northwestern University in Chicago between 1995 and 2000. He moved to Vanderbilt University in 2000 and currently holds an appointment as Professor of Biochemistry in the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Martin Egli and his associates use X-ray crystallography as their main tool to study the structures of nucleic acids, proteins, and their complexes. Ongoing efforts in his laboratory focus on the following areas. (i) Structure/function analyses of native and chemically modified nucleic acids and etiology of nucleic acid structure, correlating stability with in vitro and in vivo activity data to direct the design of nucleic acid analogs with improved efficacies for antisense and RNAi applications. (ii) Chemistry and biology of carcinogen-DNA adducts to examine relationships between the structure and biological processing of damaged bases by Y-class trans-lesion DNA polymerases. Crystal structures of binary Pol-DNA and ternary Pol-DNA-dNTP complexes are determined to shed light on the consequences of individual lesions for the accuracy of bypass. (iii) The cyanobacterial KaiABC circadian clock, which for Synechococcus elongatus can be reconstituted in vitro with the three proteins, KaiA, KaiB, and KaiC, in the presence of ATP and Mg2+, thus permitting its dissection by biochemical and biophysical means. Using a hybrid structural approach, including single crystal X-ray crystallography, electron microscopy and small angle X-ray scattering in combination with functional studies in vitro and in vivo, they are analyzing the protein-protein interactions and mechanistic aspects of this molecular clock. Website: http://structbio.vanderbilt.edu/~eglim
	Piet Herdewijn Piet Herdewijn was born in 1954 in Aalst, Belgium. He holds a Ph.D. and a Habilitation from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. He was a fellow of the Belgian National Fund of Scientific Research and of the A.V. Humboldt Stiftung during a postdoctoral stay at the University of Konstanz, Germany. He was associated professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium, and became full professor at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven in 1993. He is a co-founder of the International Society of Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids. He is member of the Board of the Rega Institute for Medical Research and a full member of the Belgian Academy of Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Association of Pharmaceutical Science. He owns a Smith-Kline Beecham award and the Paul Erhlich award from the French Therapeutic Chemistry Society. He serves in the advisory board of several journals and has published more than 500 articles in international peer reviewed journals. He teaches medicinal chemistry and his interest are situated in the medicinal and bioorganic chemistry of nucleosides and oligonucleotides with application in infectious disease and immunology. Website: http://cwisdb.kuleuven.be/persdb-bin/persdb
	Akira Matsuda Akira Matsuda was born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1949. He was educated at the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, where he received his Ph.D. in 1977 under the direction of Professor T. Ueda. He did postdoctoral studies at the University of California, San Francisco with Professor D.V. Santi, and at the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research with Dr. K.A. Watanabe. After academic appointments at Showa University, he assumed his current position on the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Hokkaido University in 1985, where he is Professor of Medicinal Chemistry. His research interests include the chemistry and medicinal chemistry of nucleoside antimetabolites, especially antitumor agents, nucleotides such as cyclic ADP-ribose derivatives, and oligonucloeotides such as 4′-thioRNA and 4′-thioDNA with biological activities. He is author or co-author of more than 400 publications (original papers) in nucleic acids chemistry, medicinal chemistry, biochemistry, and pharmacology. He was on the founding committee of the International Society for Nucleosides, Nucleotides and Nucleic Acids (IS3NA) and served as president of the society in 2007-2008. He has served as Associate Editor for Cancer Science and as Regional Editor for Nucleosides, Nucleotides & Nucleic Acids, and he has served on the Editorial Boards for Nucleic Acids Research, Oncology Research, Antiviral Chemistry & Chemotherapy, Archiv der Pharmazie, and Current Protocols in Nucleic Acid Chemistry.
	Yogesh S. Sanghvi Yogesh Sanghvi is the founder and president of Rasayan Inc. (www.rasayan.us). In 1981, he received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the National Chemical Laboratory (Pune, India), where he worked on the synthesis of natural products. From 1982 to 1985, his postdoctoral research on the synthesis of modified nucleosides was carried out at the University of London with Professor C.B. Reese. In 1986, he joined the Nucleic Acids Research Institute at ICN Pharmaceuticals (California). At ICN, he was involved in the design, synthesis, and screening of novel nucleosides and nucleotides as antiviral and antitumor agents. From 1989 to 2003, he worked at Isis Pharmaceuticals (California). The main focus of his research at Isis was the discovery, development, and manufacture of oligonucleotide-based therapeutics, and DNA and RNA modifications in combinatorial and diagnostic research. In May 2003, he founded Rasayan Inc., a company focused on consulting, outsourcing services, and supplying products related to the nucleic acid field.  Rasayan is engaged in strategic planning, securing raw materials for manufacture of oligonucleotide-based drugs on a large-scale, experimental design, and optimization of synthesis and purification protocols on a lab scale to a kilo scale, including process chemistry. His specific interests include design, synthesis, and chemistry and biochemistry of novel carbohydrates, nucleosides, nucleotides, and oligonucleotides for applications in therapeutics, combinatorial chemistry, and medical diagnostic research. Dr. Sanghvi has authored or co-authored over 140 scientific publications in leading journals, including several book chapters, and is the inventor or co-inventor of more than 40 patents. Throughout his professional history, he has attended and made numerous presentations at local and international scientific meetings and has successfully organized several symposia. He is an editor of Carbohydrate Modifications in Antisense Research, published in 1994 by the American Chemical Society.