Ronald T. Raines is an American chemical biologist. He is the Roger and Georges Firmenich Professor of Natural Products Chemistry at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for using ideas and methods of
physical organic chemistry to solve important problems in
biology.
Raines was a member of the faculty at the
University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1989 until 2017. There, he was the
Henry A. Lardy Professor of Biochemistry,
Linus Pauling Professor of Chemical Biology, and a Professor of Chemistry.[3] In 2009, he was a Visiting Associate in Chemistry at
Caltech; in 2014, he was the Givaudan–Karrer Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Universität Zürich.[4] In 2017, he returned to
Cambridge, Massachusetts to join the faculty of his alma mater,
MIT. He is also an Extramural Member of the
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT and an Associate Member of the
Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Altogether, he has mentored more than 100 graduate students and postdoctorates.[5]
Raines and his coworkers have made the following contributions.
Revelation of the basis for the conformational stability of collagen, which is the most abundant protein in animals.[6] This work led to the discovery that unappreciated chemical forces—the n→π* interaction[7] and C5 hydrogen bond[8]—contribute to the stability of nearly every protein.[9] His hyperstable collagens are in preclinical trials for the detection and treatment of wounds and fibrosis.
Discovery of how to endow an otherwise innocuous human RNA-cleaving enzyme with toxicity that is specific for cancer cells.[10] Such a ribonuclease is in a human clinical trial as an anti-cancer agent.
Mechanistic insight on cellular redox homeostasis[11] and on imperatives for the uptake of cationic proteins and peptides by mammalian cells.[12]
Invention of chemical processes to synthesize proteins[13] and to convert crude biomass into useful fuels and chemicals,[14] and fluorogenic probes to image the uptake of molecules into living cells.[15]
Raines serves on the editorial advisory boards of the journals ACS Chemical Biology; Bioconjugate Chemistry; Current Opinion in Chemical Biology; Peptide Science; Protein Engineering, Design & Selection; and Protein Science. He was the Chair of the
NIH study section that evaluated grant applications in synthetic and biological chemistry.
^"2004 ACS NATIONAL AWARD WINNERS" Accessed June 15, 2023. “Ronald T. Raines's love of chemistry blossomed during the many long afternoons he spent after school as a teenager, honing his chemistry skills with his teammates on the chemistry team at West Essex (N.J.) High School.”
^Caes, B. R.; Teixeira, R. E.; Knapp, K. G.; Raines, R. T. (2015). "Biomass to furanics: Renewable routes to chemicals and fuels". ACS Sustain. Chem. Eng. 3 (11): 2591–2605.
doi:
10.1021/acssuschemeng.5b00473.