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Catherine Drennan studies enzymes that contain metals or metallo-cofactors, to understand how nature uses them to catalyze challenging chemical reactions. She’s also interested in metalloproteins that sense changes in the cellular environment and act as gene regulators. Drennan and her team use x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy along with other biophysical and biochemical methods to capture three-dimensional “snapshots” of enzymes in action. They then piece together the information in these snapshots to build an understanding of how the metalloproteins interact, and how those interactions explain the observed behavior during complex enzyme processes.