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Life During Wartime: A Personal Recollection of the Circa 1990 Prestegard Lab and Its Contributions to Membrane Biophysics

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Abstract

A subjective account is presented of challenges and excitement of being a postdoctoral trainee in the lab of James H. Prestegard at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut from 1989 to 1991. This includes accounts of the early development of bicelles and of oriented sample NMR results that contributed to our modern understanding of the properties of the water–lipid interface of disordered phase biological membranes.

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Fig. 1

This figure is reprinted with permission from Journal of the American Chemical Society (Sanders and Prestegard 1991), copyright 1991 American Chemical Society (Color figure online)

Fig. 2

This figure is reprinted with permission from Journal of the American Chemical Society (Sanders and Prestegard 1992), copyright 1992 American Chemical Society

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful for 1989–1991 support and many good memories to Jim and Bert Prestegard, all the members of the Prestegard lab and their partners/families, honorary Prestegard lab members from other labs, friends in the adjacent Moore, Crothers, Caradonna, Brudvig, and Zilm labs, the Yale NMR staff and community, Becky and our sons Stephen, and Noah (born 2 h after President Bush’s announcement of the end of the 1st Gulf War and only 20 min after we reached the Yale Hospital), our parents and siblings who encouraged us from Ohio and Illinois, and our friends from the gone-but-not-forgotten Westside Church of Christ. I thank Ming-Daw Tsai (now at the Academia Sinica in Taipei) for helping me to navigate his papers on phosphorothioate phospholipids. The writing of this document was supported by NIH Grants RO1 HL122010, RO1 NS095989, and RF1 AG056147. I thank Kathleen Howard and Blake Hill for their helpful comments and archival materials, including (from KH) the Yale era photo of Dr. Prestegard that appears in the Table of Contents graphic. Wade Van Horn, Larry Marnett, and Tony Forster are thanked for helpful suggestions.

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  1. Department of Biochemistry, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine Basic Sciences, Nashville, TN, 37240-7917, USA

    Charles R. Sanders

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Dedicated to Dr. James H. Prestegard of the University of Georgia in honor of his 75th birthday.

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Sanders, C.R. Life During Wartime: A Personal Recollection of the Circa 1990 Prestegard Lab and Its Contributions to Membrane Biophysics. J Membrane Biol 252, 541–548 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00232-019-00090-5

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