Brian E. Coggins is Assistant Research Professor of Biochemistry in the Duke University School of Medicine, and also holds a secondary appointment as Assistant Research Professor of Biology in Duke’s Trinity College of Arts of Sciences. Despite the word “research” in his title, he is primarily responsible for teaching, serving as the course director and instructor for the Biochemistry Department’s main undergraduate introductory biochemistry courses. He teaches 350-450 undergraduates each year, and works outside the classroom to design and develop new methods and resources for biochemical education.
Dr. Coggins first came to Duke as an undergraduate, and never left. He majored in chemistry, with a concentration in biochemistry, and also earned minors in history and in Germanic languages and literature. As a sophomore he began working in the laboratory of Christian R.H. Raetz, researching the enzymology and structure of a bacterial target for antibiotic development, the enzyme LpxC; this work connected him with a new Duke assistant professor, Pei Zhou, who was applying nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to determine protein structures, and they worked together to determine the structure of this drug target. This led to a developing interest not only in protein structure and the use of NMR to study it, but also in the NMR technology itself. Staying on at Duke for graduate school, Dr. Coggins’s dissertation introduced new, more-efficient techniques for protein NMR data collection. In comparison with traditional methods, these new techniques allowed much more information—and much more useful information—to be recorded about proteins under study.
Despite the potential for further development of this work, several years of immersion in the world of engineering, signal processing, and numerical algorithms left Dr. Coggins hungering for a return to biology. A chance opportunity to teach a summer course led to a growing passion for sharing biochemistry with beginning students, and in 2010 Dr. Coggins became a full-time teaching faculty member.
Besides biochemistry, Dr. Coggins is passionate about cooking and food, about music, and about the outdoors. He is particularly fond of French cuisine, working regularly to perfect his culinary techniques and spending too much of his travel budget on Michelin-starred restaurants—but he is also known to drive around North Carolina making pilgrimages to the most remote barbecue establishments. He grew up as a classical musician, studying piano from the age of 6, and today continues to practice and perform the classical repertoire (from early composers such as Gibbons right through to Brahms, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Messiaen, with a particular love for Bach) on piano, organ, and other keyboard instruments, as well as singing tenor in vocal ensembles. He also enjoys listening to jazz and bluegrass. Dr. Coggins is in love with mountains, especially the mountains of Western North Carolina. He is an avid hiker and road cyclist, and likes to document his travels with photography.
Research Publications
19. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “CLEAN.” In Fast NMR Data Acquisition: Beyond the Fourier Transform, ed. J. Hoch and M. Mobli. Royal Society of Chemistry: London, 2017, pp. 169-219. RSC DOI
18. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Backprojection and Related Methods.” In Fast NMR Data Acquisition: Beyond the Fourier Transform, ed. J. Hoch and M. Mobli. Royal Society of Chemistry: London, 2017, pp. 119-168. RSC DOI
17. Q. Wu, B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Unbiased measurements of reconstruction fidelity of sparsely sampled magnetic resonance spectra.” Nat. Commun. 7: 12281 (2016). PubMed
16. P.N. Reardon, C.L. Marean-Reardon, M.A. Bukovec, B.E. Coggins, N.G. Isern. “3D TOCSY-HSQC NMR for Metabolic Flux Analysis Using Non-Uniform Sampling.” Anal. Chem. 88: 2825-2831 (2016). PubMed
15. B.E. Coggins, J.W. Werner-Allen, A. Yan, P. Zhou. “Rapid protein global fold determination using ultrasparse sampling, high-dynamic range artifact suppression, and time-shared NOESY.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 134: 18619-18630 (2012). PubMed
14. B.E. Coggins, R.A. Venters, P. Zhou. “Radial sampling for fast NMR: Concepts and practices over three decades.” Prog. Nucl. Magn. Reson. Spectrosc. 57: 381-419 (2010). PubMed
13. J.W. Werner-Allen, B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Fast acquisition of high resolution 4-D amide-amide NOESY with diagonal suppression, sparse sampling and FFT-CLEAN.” J. Magn. Reson. 204: 173-178 (2010). PubMed
12. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “High resolution 4-D spectroscopy with sparse concentric shell sampling and FFT-CLEAN.” J. Biomol. NMR 42: 225-239 (2008). PubMed
11. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Sampling of the NMR time domain along concentric rings.” J. Magn. Reson. 184: 207-221 (2007). PubMed
10. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Polar Fourier transforms of radially sampled NMR data.” J. Magn. Reson. 182: 84-95 (2006). PubMed
9. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “PR-CALC: a program for the reconstruction of NMR spectra from projections.” J. Biomol. NMR 34: 179-195 (2006). PubMed
8. B.E. Coggins, R.A. Venters, P. Zhou. “Filtered backprojection for the reconstruction of a high-resolution (4,2)D CH3-NH NOESY spectrum on a 29 kDa protein.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127: 11562-11563 (2005). PubMed
7. L. Jiang, B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “Rapid assignment of protein side chain resonances using projection-reconstruction of (4,3)D HC(CCO)NH and intra-HC(C)NH experiments.” J. Magn. Reson. 175: 170-176 (2005). PubMed
6. R.A. Venters, B.E. Coggins, D. Kojetin, J. Cavanagh, P. Zhou. “(4,2)D Projection–reconstruction experiments for protein backbone assignment: application to human carbonic anhydrase II and calbindin D(28K).” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 127: 8785-8795 (2005). PubMed
5. B.E. Coggins, A.L. McClerren, L. Jiang, X. Li, J. Rudolph, O. Hindsgaul, C.R.H. Raetz, P. Zhou. “Refined solution structure of the LpxC-TU-514 complex and pKa analysis of an active site histidine: insights into the mechanism and inhibitor design.” Biochemistry 44: 1114-1126 (2005). PubMed
4. B.E. Coggins, R.A. Venters, P. Zhou. “Generalized reconstruction of n-D NMR spectra from multiple projections: application to the 5-D HACACONH spectrum of protein G B1 domain.” J. Am. Chem. Soc. 126: 1000-1001 (2004). PubMed
3. B.E. Coggins, X. Li, O. Hindsgaul, C.R.H. Raetz, P. Zhou. “Assignment of the 1H, 13C and 15N resonances of the LpxC deacetylase from Aquifex aeolicus in complex with the substrate-analog inhibitor TU-514.” J. Biomol. NMR 28: 201-202 (2004). PubMed
2. B.E. Coggins, X. Li, A.L. McClerren, O. Hindsgaul, C.R.H. Raetz, P. Zhou. “Structure of the LpxC deacetylase with a bound substrate-analog inhibitor.” Nat. Struct. Biol. 10: 645-651 (2003). PubMed
1. B.E. Coggins, P. Zhou. “PACES: Protein sequential assignment by computer-assisted exhaustive search.” J. Biomol. NMR 26: 93-111 (2003). PubMed
