Mildred Cohn

Benjamin Rush Professor of Physiological Chemistry, Emerita, University of Pennsylvania. Research concentrated on enzyme mechanism. With the use of isotopic (18)O, she investigated the location of bond cleavage in phosphate compounds and the water phosphate oxygen exchange in oxidative phosphorylation. Subsequently she extended the studies with magnetic resonance techniques, EPR (Mn complexes) and NMR ((31)P and proton relaxation rates of water due to Mn-enzyme complexes) revealing conformational changes at active sites and determining equilibrium constants of approximately 1 between the central complexes of many reactions. Currently her interest is in in vivo NMR.