Nicholas M. Pearce

Papers

Total Citations

123

H-Index

About

Nicholas M. Pearce is a structural biologist whose work has advanced the frontiers of high-throughput X-ray crystallography. His primary research focuses on developing innovative methods to accelerate and improve the efficiency of macromolecular structure determination, particularly for drug discovery. Pearce’s most impactful contribution is the development of a gentle, fast, and effective crystal soaking technique using acoustic dispensing, a method that has fundamentally streamlined sample preparation for ligand-binding studies. This breakthrough, detailed in his highly cited 2017 paper (119 citations), directly addresses the bottleneck created by increasingly powerful synchrotron beamlines and robotics. By enabling precise, non-contact delivery of compounds to protein crystals, his work has dramatically increased the throughput and reliability of fragment screening and structure-based drug design. Pearce’s achievements are notable for their direct, practical impact on the crystallography community, solving a critical logistical challenge and enabling researchers to fully leverage modern data collection technologies. His contributions represent a key step in the evolution of crystallography from a manual art to a high-speed, automated science.