Transition States in Biological Chemistry: Stereoelectronics and Catalytic Mechanisms

Nigel Richards is Professor of Biological Chemistry at Cardiff University. He is well known for integrating computational and experimental methods to solve problems in mechanistic enzymology, and is a leading expert on oxalate and asparagine metabolism. His work has been described in over 130 papers and two US patents. Professor Richards is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2010) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry (2016).

Mike Blackburn has been active in chemical biology research for over 50 years. He studied enzyme catalysis with W. P. Jencks and is an expert on the use of stable analogues of phosphate esters and anhydrides for studies on nucleotide-related metabolism and glycolysis. His most recent work has employed metal fluorides to generate transition state analogues for phosphoryl transfer reactions by kinases, mutases, and isomerases. He has authored some 300 research papers, several patents and one book (＂Nucleic Acids in Chemistry and Biology＂).