John Franck
Syracuse University, NY·Chemistry·Early-career
The water immediately surrounding and threading through a large molecule behaves nothing like ordinary water from a tap. This hydration water helps set the shapes proteins and synthetic polymers adopt and governs how strongly and how quickly they bind one another.
- Fields
Chemistry
Biophysics
- Topics
hydration water
Overhauser dynamic nuclear polarization
spin probe
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Build instrumentation and open-source analysis software that turn liquid-state Overhauser Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (ODNP) into a routine method for characterizing hydration water around macromolecules.
- Measure, at specific chemically labeled sites, how water nuclei move relative to an attached spin probe, and relate these site-specific results directly to fully atomistic molecular dynamics simulations.
- Connect nanometer-scale variations in hydration dynamics to the thermodynamic barriers controlling ligand binding and protein-protein and polymer interactions, resolving water motions on different timescales.
More about the research
Every binding event and every shape change has to displace hundreds of these water molecules, so their properties control the underlying energetics and kinetics. Yet they remain hard to characterize, which is a major reason protein-protein binding and polymer-solvent behavior stay difficult to predict. This project develops instrumentation and software to make such measurements routine.
Why it matters
A better handle on hydration water could improve predictions of how drug molecules bind their protein targets and how polymers behave in solution, speeding the design of new drugs and materials with potential relevance to areas such as cancer treatment and energy harvesting. The open-source data-processing libraries would let other laboratories apply and interpret the same measurements.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
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The school
Syracuse University: 13 labs on PI Pages, $199M a year on research, 168 research doctorates a year.
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