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Office Hours:
On leave 2008-2009
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Jim Larrabee
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Professor of Chemistry & Biochemistry
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McCardell Bicentennial Hall 547
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Phone: 802.443.5453
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Email: larrabee@middlebury.edu
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Degrees, Specializations & Interests:
B.S. from Trinity College; Ph.D. from Princeton
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Jim Larrabee obtained a B.S. degree from Trinity College and a Ph.D. degree from Princeton University. He worked for Exxon Research and Engineering Company as a Research Chemist before joining the Middlebury Faculty in 1986. Research Interests
My area of research specialization is bioinorganic chemistry which is the study of biological molecules which contain or react with metallic elements. My most recent work is in the application of magnetic circular dichroism and cobalt substitution to probe the electronic and physical structure of zinc enzyme active sites. We have just completed a study of a number of four- and five-coordinate cobalt(II) complexes and cobalt-substituted zinc enzymes to investigate the effect of geometry on the electronic structure of the ground state. We are currently involved in trying to measure the effect of electronic coupling between closely spaced cobalt's in the cobalt-substituted dimer proteins hemocyanin and hemerythrin and in the native cobalt dimer enzyme methionine amino peptidase.
Recent Publications
* Denotes Middlebury College undergraduate co-authors.
Choi, S.; Vastag, L.*; Leung, C. H.*; Beard, A. M.*, Knowles, D. E.*, Larrabee, J. A. "Kinetics and Mechanism of Oxidation of Guanosine Derivatives by Platinum(IV) Complexes" Inorg. Chem., 2006, 45, 10108-10114. Larrabee, J. A., *Thamrong-nawasawat, T. *, Mon, S. Y.* "High-Pressure Liquid Chromatographic Method for the Assay of Methionine Aminopeptidase Activity: Application to the Study of Enzymatic Inactivation", Anal. Biochem., 1999, 269, 194-198.
Larrabee, J. A.; Alessi, C. M.*; Asiedu, E. T.*; Cook, J. O.*; Hoerning, K. R.*; Klingler, L. J.*; Okin, G. S.*; Santee, S. G.*; Volkert, T. L.* "Magnetic Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy as a Probe of Geometric and Electronic Structure of Cobalt(II)-Substituted Proteins: Ground State Zero Field Splitting as a Coordination Number Indicator", J. Am. Chem. Soc., 1997, 119, 4182-4196.
Cobalt(II)-Substituted Limulus polyphemus Hemocyanin: Cobalt Equilibria, Ligand Binding, and Oxygenation Chemistry
Inorganic Chemistry, 29, 2272-2278 (1990).
Recent Grants
2006-2009 NSF/RUI, CHE-0554083, “Determination of Magnetic Exchange Coupling in Carboxylate-Bridged
Binuclear Co(II) by Magnetic Circular Dichroism”, $180,000