Ruth Nussinov

Ruth Nussinov (

In 1978, Nussinov proposed the first dynamic programming approach for nucleic acid secondary structure prediction, this method is now known as the Nussinov algorithm.^[4][5]

In the 1990s, she pioneered the concept of dynamic

Nussinov has authored about 750 scientific papers with more than 51,000 citations as of 2023 and has given hundreds of invited talks.[11]^[12] Most recently, she has pioneered the connection, on the structural and cellular levels, of cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders asking How can same-gene mutations promote both cancer and developmental disorders?.^[13]

A personal scientific overview of her biography has been published in 2018 as “Autobiography of Ruth Nussinov”.^[14]

Education

Ruth Nussinov received her B.Sc in Microbiology from University of Washington in 1966, her M.Sc in biochemistry from Rutgers University in 1967.^[12] After an 8-year break to have 3 children, she went back to school in 1975, and received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Rutgers University in 1977.^[14] Her thesis was titled Secondary structure analysis of nucleic acids.^[12]

Career

She was a postdoctoral fellow at the

• Elected Fellow of the Biophysical Society for "extraordinary contributions to advances in computational biology on both nucleic acids and proteins" (2011)^[19]
• Distinguished Ulam Scholar, The Center for Nonlinear Studies (CNLS), Los Alamos National Labs (2012)^[12]
• Elected Fellow of the
  ISCB) (2013)^[20]
• Theodore von Kármán Fellow Award (2015)^[12]
• Special Lifetime Award, The Israeli Society for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (ISBCB) (2015)^[21]
• Computational Molecular Medicine: A minisymposium dedicated to Ruth Nussinov (2015)^[22]
• KeyLab Award for "outstanding achievements in biomolecular simulations in translational medicine" (2018)^[23]
• ISCB Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award (2018)^[24]
• Annual Achievement Award, Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research (2020)^[12]
• ACS Fall 2020 meeting “Dynamic ensembles, cell signaling and drug discovery: A symposium in honor of Ruth Nussinov (2020)^[12]
• Elected Fellow of American Physical Society (APS) (2021)^[25]
• Ruth Nussinov Festschrift, American Chemical Society (ACS) (2021)^[26]
• AIMBE) College of Fellows Class of 2021 (Medical and biological engineering elite) (2021)^[27]

In 1978, Nussinov published a dynamic programming algorithm for RNA secondary structure prediction, which has since been the leading method.^[4] It has since been taught in bioinformatics and computational biology classes in Europe and the US, it is included in books, and exploited in multiple software packages.

Besides her work on nucleic acid secondary structure prediction, Nussinov is also regarded as a pioneer in DNA sequence analysis for her work in the early 1980s.^[28][29]

In the 1990s Nussinov pioneered the role of dynamic

The new concepts that her group pioneered have changed the way biophysicists and structural biologists think about protein-ligand interactions and are now included in chemistry/biochemistry courses. The profound significance, and advance was also heralded in Science as innovating on the decades-old concepts, noting that "although textbooks have championed the induced fit mechanism for more than 50 years, data (especially NMR) unequivocally support the powerful paradigm for diverse biological processes".^[34] The conformational selection/population shift mechanism is now widely established. As Nussinov and others have shown, the new paradigm helps unravel processes as diverse as signaling, catalysis, gene regulation, and aggregation in amyloid diseases, and recently, the mechanisms of activating mutations in cancer, and addressing the puzzling question of how same-gene mutations can promote both cancer and neurodevelopmental disorders.^[35][13]

References