Paul Emsley is a British

crystallographer A crystallographer is a type of scientist who practices crystallography, in other words, who studies crystals. Career paths The work of crystallographers spans several academic disciplines, including the life sciences, chemistry, physics, and m ...

at the

MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...

in Cambridge. He works as an independent scientist and is a member of the Computational Crystallography Group headed by Garib Murshudov. Emsley is the primary author of the model-building software

Coot Coots are medium-sized water birds that are members of the rail family, Rallidae. They constitute the genus ''Fulica'', the name being the Latin term for "coot". Coots have predominantly black plumage, and—unlike many rails—they are usual ...

,Emsley, P., Lohkamp, B., Scott, W.G. and Cowtan, K., 2010
Features and development of Coot
''Acta Crystallographica Section D'', ''66''(4), pp.486-501. a tool for building models of proteins whose three dimensional structures are determined via

X-ray crystallography X-ray crystallography is the experimental science of determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to Diffraction, diffract in specific directions. By measuring th ...

cryo-EM Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a transmission electron microscopy technique applied to samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice. An ...

. These protein structures are deposited at the

Worldwide Protein Data Bank The Worldwide Protein Data Bank (wwPDB) is an organization that maintains the archive of macromolecular structure. Its mission is to maintain a single Protein Data Bank Archive of macromolecular A macromolecule is a "molecule of high relat ...

for collaboration among scientists. Since its introduction in 2004, Coot has remained as

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

for use in industrial and academic research groups. Emsley has given lectures and tutorials on model-building and validation at

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, botany, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is located in Laurel Hollow, New York, in Nassau County, on ...

and as CCP4 courses, where he is also a developer and contributor.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Emsley, Paul British crystallographers 1966 births Living people