Donald Crothers

Donald Morris Crothers
Don Crothers, photographed 18 June 2011
Born	(1937-01-28)January 28, 1937 Fatehgarh, India
Died	March 16, 2014(2014-03-16) (aged 77) New Haven, Connecticut
Citizenship	American
Nationality	American
Fields	Chemistry
Institutions	Yale University
Alma mater	Yale University University of Cambridge UCSD
Thesis	The denaturation of helical polynucleotides (1963)
Doctoral advisor	Bruno Zimm
Known for	Nucleic acid structure and function
Spouse	Leena Kareoja-Crothers

Donald Crothers (January 28, 1937 – March 16, 2014) was a professor of chemistry at Yale University in the United States. He was best known for his work on nucleic acid structure and function.

Donald Crothers was the son of the late Morris King Crothers and Florence Kittredge Crothers. He graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1958 with a B.S. in Chemistry and earned a B.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1960. He received his Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, in 1963, working with Bruno Zimm.

As a Yale undergraduate, Crothers worked with Ignacio Tinoco, then a postdoctoral associate, in the laboratory of John Kirkwood. Along with Victor Bloomfield, Crothers and Tinoco later co-authored two books, including the 1974 text Physical Chemistry of Nucleic Acids," updated in 2000 as "Nucleic Acids: Structures, Properties, and Functions."

After a postdoctoral fellowship with Manfred Eigen at the Max-Planck-Institut in Göttingen, Germany, he returned to Yale University as a faculty member in the Department of Chemistry in 1964. Professor Crothers was named to an associate professorship in 1968, to a full professorship in 1971, and to the Alfred E. Kemp Professorship in Chemistry in 1985. He served four three-year terms as Chairman of the Yale Department of Chemistry (1975-1981; 1994-2000). At the time of his retirement in 2003, he was Sterling Professor of Chemistry and held a joint appointment in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, of which he was a founding member.

After retiring from Yale, Crothers worked as a partner and scientific consultant for numerous biotechnology firms.

Crothers was a co-inventor of the Zimm–Crothers viscometer. Among the most frequently cited papers from the Crothers lab is a method for the widely used electrophoretic mobility shift assay, better known as a "gel shift" assay, which is used to detect and estimate the affinity of protein-nucleic acid complexes. He made many other contributions to areas including the thermodynamics of secondary structure in RNA and DNA, the role of magnesium in RNA tertiary structure, DNA-drug interactions, sequence-directed and protein-induced DNA bending, DNA cyclization kinetics, RNA folding in riboswitches, protein-RNA structure, mechanisms of transcription, and nucleosome positioning.