idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Ada E.Yonath, the fourth woman who was ever awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (2009), will open the Scientific Programme of the 60th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting on June 28. In a lecture titled “The amazing ribosome,” she will talk about this specific biological factory of medical importance whose chemical construction she elucidated with a physical method. Thus her subject perfectly fits the interdisciplinarity of this year’s anniversary when 61 Laureates in physics, chemistry and physiology or medicine will convene at Lake Constance, almost three times as many Laureates than usual. The audience will include 650 top talented young researchers, 275 of whom are women, from 70 Countries.
Yonath’s talk also exemplifies the breathtaking pace at which biochemistry has developed since the inaugural Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 1951 when neither the structure nor the functionality of the genetic information carrier DNA was known and all proteins were still largely obscure. In his inspiring lecture at Lindau in 1968, titled the “History of the Determination of Protein Structure“, the physicist Sir Lawrence Bragg underlined the vital importance of an interdisciplinary cooperation between the sciences to uncover the secrets of life. Based on a discovery of the German physicist Max von Laue, Bragg had invented x-ray crystallography together with his father Henry shortly before World War I, an achievement that earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1915. Lawrence Bragg was 25 years old then – as young as many of the international top talents taking part in this year´s meeting.
Crystal Keys are elucidating Life
After having been appointed head of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, in 1938, Bragg oversaw the application of x-ray crystallography to the structural elucidation of complex molecules of life with enduring and encouraging leadership. It was at the Cavendish where Francis Crick and James Watson (Nobel Prize in Medicine 1962) – drawing on data from Rosalind Franklin – deciphered the structure of DNA. Working also at the Cavendish, John Kendrew and Max Perutz (Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 1962) elucidated the first structures of big proteins. Bragg proudly mentioned these successes in his lecture which is available on the newly created media online library of the Lindau meetings. “A few years ago, two of the young people working in my physics laboratory shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, and two of them shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine”, he cheerfully turned to Count Bernadotte in his introductory remarks. “There is therefore no reason that I can see that you should not invite me every year.”
Persistence and the interaction of sciences in the development of new methods led to our current knowledge of many highly complex three-dimensional structures in nature. Max Perutz, for example, spent more than 20 years elucidating the structure of the oxygen transporter haemoglobin, a protein with approximately 10.000 atoms. Quite similarly Ada E. Yonath showed great ambition when she decided to embark on the adventure of mapping the structure of the ribosome, a complex of many proteins and nucleic acids specializing in protein synthesis and consisting of hundreds of thousands of atoms, at the end of the 1970s. The scientific community was quite sceptical about her chances of success. Nevertheless, Yonath pursued her project, and Thomas Steitz and Venki Ramakrishnan, working in their own labs, later decided to join her efforts. In 2000, all three scientists published their results which turned out to be worth a Nobel Prize.
Structural Biology remains challenging
Many insights into basic functions of life are owed to x-ray crystallography. How the genetic information stored on DNA is copied to RNA and serves as a blueprint for protein synthesis at the ribosome, is something we have learned to understand in detail from crystallographers, in addition to many mechanisms of transport and communication via proteins in cell membranes. One of the innumerable proteins of life is the smallest natural engine, ATP synthase, an enzyme that produces the energy required for living in the power stations of our cells, the mitochondria. John E. Walker (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1997), who revealed its function by means of crystallography, will come to Lindau this year. Also attending the meeting this year are Hans Deisenhofer, Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel who first succeeded in elucidating the structure of a membrane protein, an achievement that earned them a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1988.
But knowing the spatial structure of a biomolecule not necessarily enables a scientist to directly deduce its function. Many correlations between structure and function remain to be resolved, as Deisenhofer will discuss in his talk „Structural Studies on Cholesterol Transport“. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy might help for a better understanding and is gaining increasing importance for the structural elucidation of biomolecules. One of its pioneers, Kurt Wüthrich (Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2002), will talk about „Structural Genomics with the Expanding Universe of Protein Sequences“. A panel with five Laureates will discuss the “Impact of Chemistry and Physics to Biomedicine” on Tuesday, June 29. The current topic of artificial life will play a role already on Monday, immediately after Yonath’s opening lecture. Jack W. Szostak, last year’s Nobel laureate in medicine, will take centre stage with his lecture “Learning about the Origin of Life from Efforts to Design an Artificial Cell”.
http://tinyurl.com/37xhazt - Audio recording of the lecture "History of the Determination of Protein Structure" held by Sir Lawrence Bragg (Nobel Prize in Physics 1915) at Lindau 1968
http://tinyurl.com/2ve993w - Lectures held at the 59th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in 2009
http://www.lindau-nobel.org - Programme and Participants of the 60th Meeting in Lindau
http://lindau.nature.com - Social Media Activities during the 60th Meeting incl. Blogs, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and much more
Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
Biologie, Chemie, Medizin, Physik / Astronomie
überregional
Forschungs- / Wissenstransfer, Wissenschaftliche Tagungen
Englisch
Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.
Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).
Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.
Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).
Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).
