Kimberley Laband

Kim joined the Goodwin Laboratory during her junior year of high school.  She spent her first summer in the laboratory learning the ropes.  To borrow a cliche, Kim took to the lab like a duck to water, identifying her own nickname, the "Mad Scientist".  During her second summer, Kim contributed a great deal to our project on peroxidase-catalyzed oxidation of naturally occuring o-methoxyphenols.  She spent many hours carrying out sequential-mixing stopped-flow experiments.  By the end of the summer, she had collected rate constants (in triplicate) for fourteen different reactions.  Her efforts contributed a substantial part of one of our presentations at the American Chemical Society National Meeting in New York (September 7 - 11, 2003).  She is a co-author on an invited book chapter arising from that presentation, and she presented an award-winning poster at the Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Atlanta, GA (November 16 - 19, 2003). She shared First-Place among posters presented by undergraduate students.  Kim has also been honored as an Auburn University Undergraduate Research Fellow.  In her current project, Kim is applying site-directed mutagenesis to evaluate the role of a set of highly conserved residues in catalase-peroxidase structure and catalysis.  In keeping with her high level of performance, Kim gave an oral presentation of her results at this year's Southeast Regional Meeting of the American Chemical Society at Research Triangle Park, NC.  For her talk she was given an award (Second-Place award in the Inorganic Division for undergraduate talks).

Abstracts and Publications

Moore, R., Goodwin, D. C., Laband, K. A., and Powell, L.  2006. Role of interdomain salt bridge on catalase-peroxidase activity.  American Chemical Society, 231st National Meeting, Atlanta, Georgia.

Goodwin, D. C., Laband, K. A., and Hertwig, K. M.  2005.  Oxidation of capsaicinoids by peroxidases: kinetic, structural, and physiological considerations.  In  Phenolics in Foods and Natural Health Products.  Shahidi, F., and Ho, C. T., Eds. ACS Symposium Series, Vol. 909, pp. 161 - 174.

Laband, K. A., Baker, R. D., and Goodwin, D. C.  2004.  Contributions of an interdomain ion pair to the bifunctional properties of catalase-peroxidases.  Amer. Chem. Soc. Southeast Regional Meeting, Research Triangle Park, NC.

Goodwin, D. C., Baker, R. D., Cook, C. O., and Laband, K. A. 2004.  Integral Involvement of an “Inactive” Domain in Catalase-Peroxidase Structure and Catalysis.  Enzymes, Coenzymes, and Metabolic Pathways Gordon Conference, Meriden, NH.

Laband, K. A., and Goodwin, D. C.  2003.  Peroxidase-catalyzed oxidation of plant-derived o-methoxyphenols: implications for the metabolism of health-promoting phenolic compounds.  Amer. Chem. Soc. Southeast Regional Meeting, Atlanta, GA.