Dr. Gilles-Gonzalez was born in Jeremie, Haiti and came to the USA at age thirteen. She spent her formative years in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section Brooklyn, New York City, back when it was colorful, lively, and character-building . After obtaining her B.S. in Biochemistry from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, she studied for her Ph.D. under Dr. Gobind Khorana at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she examined structure-function relationships in the proton-pumping membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin. During a postdoctoral with Dr. Donald Helinski at U.C. San Diego, she discovered that the FixL protein contains heme and identified this protein as the first known direct sensor of molecular oxygen. Since then she has devoted her research to understanding the mechanisms by which living organisms respond to oxygen and other physiological gases. FixL is an enzyme (a protein histidine kinase) whose activity is controlled by a regulatory heme on the same molecule. During a postdoctoral with Dr. Max Perutz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK), she began to elucidate the mechanism by which the FixL protein responds to oxygen. In her own laboratory, she and her colleagues discovered that FixL belongs to a much broader family of sensors, only some of which are protein histidine kinases. Other members of this family include diguanylate cyclases, c-di-GMP phosphodiesterases, and transcription factors. Their research has expanded to examine oxygen sensors that span all three major kingdoms of life and govern important adaptations to fluctuating levels of this gas. These include sensors that control dormancy and biofilm formation by pathogenic bacteria.
