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Professional background
"Success
in Science is 10 % of talent, 10% of good luck, and 80% of persistence"
Published articles, patents
presentations
Main scientific achievements
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Chemistry, that magic play with molecules has always just fascinated me.
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My love to the Nature has
ultimately been "responsible" for selecting my career as a
scientist at the age of nine. I started
as a teenager creating chlorine by oxidation of hydrochloric acid with potassium permanganate, making black powder from sulfur, potassium
nitrite and charcoal, or making contact explosives from acetone
peroxide. Chemistry, that magic play with molecules just fascinated me. I
always wanted to find answers to many questions explaining natural
events around me. The most intriguing of all were those biological
ones...Applying simple chemical principles to large biological
macromolecules appeared having the most sense of all other ways to
explain biology in simple terms.
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After finishing my M.S. degree in
Organic
Chemistry at Slovak
University of Technology I focused on biochemistry, protein
chemistry and enzymology in the course of my graduate study at the Institute
of Molecular Biology, Slovak
Academy of Sciences, Bratislava. Although still under political
oppression of Communism I received decent education that had created a
good foundation for my latter scientific career. I transformed my
fascination with molecules into research on understanding large
biological macromolecules - proteins. Somehow, I had an intuition at
that time that
the proteins are the molecules essential for functioning of living
cell. Trying to understand them was also providing enough
challenges for me to keep me interested.
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Ribonuclease Sa
In my Ph. D. thesis I focused on the relationship between the
structure and function of guanyloribonuclease
Sa from Streptomyces aureofaciens by chemical modification
of amino acid residues
(Kery
et al., 1986). Similar techniques were used to study rat liver
nuclear receptor (Brtko
et al., 1989). Our suggestions on mechanism of action of this
ribonuclease were later confirmed by analyzing tertiary structure of the
enzyme.
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Structure of curdlan - a member of b-1,3-glucan
family of polysaccharides |
My first real job was as a head of the
Laboratory of Enzyme Catalysis and Inhibition at the Institute
of Chemistry, Slovak
Academy of Sciences, Bratislava. Besides work on biosensors my research studies were also dedicated to enzymology of
lipases (Kery
et al., 1990), and enzymes of carbohydrate metabolism (Kery
et al., 1991). I was also interested in affinity interactions at
the phase boundaries in heterogeneous phase polymer systems (Pavliak
et al., 1989). |
| Among other things I was working in the field of
carbohydrate chemistry and biochemistry. One of my major accomplishments
was preparation and therapeutic testing of conjugates of
anti-cancer drug arabinosylcytosine with an immunomodulatory molecule of
b-1,3-glucan (Kery
et al. 1990, Novotny
et al., 1991). . It was a part of my broader study on lectin
carbohydrate interactions in immunoregulation (Kery
V, 1991).
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We found that immobilized b-galactosidase from E. coli
can be used for anhydrous synthesis of modified disaccharides (Kery
et al; 1991) |
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Structure of hyaluronic acid binding protein in complex with
hyaluronic acid. We purified the protein from bovine cartilage using it for
developing of a microplate assay to determine
hyaluronic acid, a marker for progression of arthritis in clinical Rheumatology (Orvisky
et al., 1991). The assay was as sensitive as the only
radioactive one on the market but it did not use radioactivity. |
Latter, I was appointed as a
research scientist at the Department of
Biochemistry of the Institute
of Rheumatic Diseases in beautiful spa town of Piestany,
Slovakia. Here I worked in the field of diagnostics and therapy of
rheumatic diseases. We developed several assays useful in clinical
Rheumatology (urinary glycosamino glycans (Kery
et al., 1992), lectins (Orvisky
et al., 1992), and hyaluronic acid (Orvisky
et al., 1991)). One of our most interesting finding was a discovery of inhibitory
properties of oligomannosides and mannans on rat adjuvant arthritis (Kery
et al., 1993).
Recollections on our great team in Piestany. We had fun
doing research although under difficult conditions of limited funding
and political oppression.
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| Tempted by the land of scientific opportunities and
personal freedom I ultimately accepted an offer to work on lectin - carbohydrate interactions in the
Laboratory
of Dr. Phil Stahl at the Department
of Cell Biology, Washington
University School of Medicine, St. Louis, USA. Here I worked on
purification and carbohydrate binding domain characterization of human
macrophage mannose receptor. We found that different carbohydrate binding domains of the mannose receptor exhibit different affinities to different
mannose oligo- and poly-saccharides (Kery
et al., 1992). |
Structure of the human macrophage mannose receptor (Napper
et al., 2001) |
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