Peter B. Moore
Yale University
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Primary Section: 29, Biophysics and Computational Biology Secondary Section: 21, Biochemistry Membership Type:
Member
(elected 1997)
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Biosketch
Moore got his Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard in 1966, and following postdoctoral studies at the University of Geneva, and the Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge), he joined the faculty of Yale University. There, until his retirement in 2010, his research focused primarily on the structure of the ribosome, its components, and related macromolecules, which he pursued using a variety of techniques including neutron small angle scattering, NMR, and X-ray crystallography.
Research Interests
The structure of biological macromolecules and macromolecular assemblies has been the focus of my research for many years. I started working in this area while I was a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (U.K.) where I helped deduce the structures of muscle filaments from electron micrographs using the then novel method three-dimensional reconstruction. Shortly after joining the faculty at Yale, and in collaboration with D.M. Engelman, I began determining the positions of proteins in the small ribosomal subunit using a novel method that depended on neutron scattering. This project consumed most of our resources for 15 years. Around 1980, the focus of the laboratory started shifting from low resolution approaches to macromolecular structure to high resolution methods. Since then, we have determined the solution structures of several RNAs by nuclear magnetic resonance. We have also been studying some of the macromolecules involved in protein synthesis crystallographically. The most intriguing of the crystallographic projects now under way is a collaboration with T.A. Steitz, the objective of which is the determination of the crystal structure of the large ribosomal subunit.
