Chothia

Chothia refers to Cyrus Chothia, a British structural biologist and immunologist who made foundational contributions to the understanding of antibody structure and evolution. He helped develop the concept of canonical structures for the antibody variable regions, explaining how a limited set of loop conformations can account for much of the diversity in antigen binding. His work on the immunoglobulin fold and the structural classification of antibody variable domains advanced the field of structural immunology and informed later antibody engineering.

Chothia spent much of his career at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, where he collaborated with researchers across disciplines, combining X-ray crystallography, structural analysis, and computational approaches to study protein families, particularly immunoglobulins. In addition to antibodies, his research contributed to broader questions in protein evolution and the relationship between sequence variation and structure.

His work is widely cited in immunology and structural biology, and the term "Chothia canonical structures" is often used to describe the recurring shapes of CDR loops in antibodies. He is recognized as a pioneer in applying structural biology to immunology and in improving our understanding of how antibodies recognize antigens.