Alfred Pingoud

Alfred Pingoud

Alfred Marius Pingoud (born August 31, 1945 in Schwaan , Mecklenburg ; † July 30, 2015 in Hanover , Lower Saxony ) was a German biochemist.

Life

Alfred Pingoud was born the son of a businessman and a teacher in Schwaan / Mecklenburg. From 1951 to 1955 he attended elementary school in Großenbrach / Bavaria, from 1955 he attended grammar school in Langen / Hesse, where he obtained the general university entrance qualification in 1964.

In the summer semester of 1964 he began studying biochemistry in Tübingen . After the preliminary exams he studied physical chemistry for a year at Amherst College in Amherst / Massachusetts, USA. After his return in 1969 he wrote his diploma thesis on the subject of "Investigations in aldehyde oxidase " with Ernst Bayer .

He then worked on "Physical-chemical studies of the interaction between the seryl-tRNA synthetase from yeast and their substrates" with G. Maass in the section "Biophysical Chemistry" of the Society for Molecular biological research and in 1973 at the Faculty of Science of Technology University of Braunschweig as “Dr. rer. nat. "PhD.

Alfred M. Pingoud followed his doctoral supervisor to Hanover and worked from 1973 to 1979 as a scientific assistant at the Hanover Medical School , Chair of Physiological Chemistry II (Department of Biophysical Chemistry ), where he also served as an academic adviser from 1978. There he worked on his habilitation thesis "The formation of the ternary complex of elongation factor Tu, GTP and aminoacyl-tRNA: specificity, diversity and inhibition" and received his venia legendi for biochemistry in 1979.

He taught and worked as an associate professor in Hanover until he accepted a position at the Justus Liebig University in Giessen in 1992, where he established the Institute of Biochemistry (Department of Biology and Chemistry), of which he was Managing Director until his retirement on March 31 2013 was.

Alfred M. Pingoud was married and has two sons. He died on July 30, 2015 in Hanover.

Act

Alfred M. Pingoud has been researching the structure-function relationships of enzymes and their substrates as well as protein design and protein engineering for over 40 years , with around 300 publications in international scientific journals. The last 30 years of his research he has mainly devoted himself to nucleases from prokaryotes and eukaryotes , especially the non-specific as well as the very specific nucleases. He has made various contributions to the enzymology of restriction endonucleases , homing endonucleases , apoptotic nucleases and - more recently - also programmable nucleases for the modification of a genome .

His focus is on the mechanistic aspects of the action of these nucleases, including recognition sequence and localization, as well as catalysis, which were investigated by steady-state and pre-steady-state kinetics . Also be applied mutation analysis and chemical lately and photochemical networks and fluorescence resonance energy transfer techniques . One research aspect of his work deals with protein design and protein engineering in order to be able to use these enzymes in a meaningful way for gene targeting and gene therapy .

Awards

• 1965 Fulbright scholarship
• 1969 Pre-doctoral membership of the Max Planck Society
• 1986 visiting professor at the " Università degli Studi di Camerino " ( Camerino , Italy)
• 1997 visiting professor at the "Central Drug Research Institute" ( Lucknow , India) and at the "Indian Institute of Science" ( Bangalore , India), invited by the "Council of Scientific and Industrial Research" (CSIR)
• 1997 visiting professor at Saga Medical School (Japan), invited by the "Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science" (JSPS)
• 2005 Member of the "Faculty of 1000 Biology"
• 2006 Member of the "Excellence Cluster Cardio-Pulmonary System" (University of Giessen)

Functions

• 1997 - 2007 speaker of the DFG-funded graduate college "Biochemistry of Nucleoprotein Complexes"
• 2002 - 2004 coordinator of the DAAD-funded International Quality Network "Biochemistry of nucleic acids"
• 2005 - 2008 coordinator of the EU-funded Asia Link program "Human resources development in the study of nucleic acids"
• 2005 - 2009 coordinator of the EU-funded Marie Curie Research Training Network "A multidisciplinary approach to the study of DNA enzymes down to the single molecule level"

Publications (selection)

Books

• Alfred Pingoud, Claus Urbanke: Working methods of biochemistry . Walter de Gruyter 1997, ISBN 3-11-014696-7 .
• Alfred Pingoud, Claus Urbanke, Jim Hoggett, Albert Jeltsch: Biochemical methods: a concise guide for students and researchers . Volume 1. Wiley-VCH 2002, ISBN 3-527-30299-9 .
• Alfred Pingoud (Ed.): Restriction Endonucleases . Volume 14 of Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology . Springer 2004, ISBN 3-540-20502-0 .

Scientific Article

• A. Jeltsch, J. Alves, H. Wolfes, G. Maass, A. Pingoud: Substrate-assisted catalysis in the cleavage of DNA by the EcoRI and EcoRV restriction enzymes. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 90, 1993, pp. 8499-8503.
• F. Stahl, W. Wende, A. Jeltsch, A. Pingoud: Introduction of asymmetry in the naturally symmetric restriction endonuclease EcoRV to investigate intersubunit communication in the homodimeric protein. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 93, 1996, pp. 6175-6180.
• W. Wende, W. Grindl, F. Christ, A. Pingoud, V. Pingoud: Binding, bending and cleavage of DNA substrates by the homing endonuclease PI-SceI. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 24, 1996, pp. 4123-4132.
• C. Schulze, A. Jeltsch, I. Franke, C. Urbanke, A. Pingoud: Crosslinking the EcoRV restriction endonuclease across the DNA-binding site reveals transient intermediates and conformational changes of the enzyme during DNA binding and catalytic turnover. In: EMBO Journal. Volume 17, 1998, pp. 6757-6766.
• F. Christ, S. Schoettler, W. Wende, S. Steuer, A. Pingoud, V. Pingoud: The monomeric homing endonuclease PI-SceI has two catalytic centers for cleavage of the two strands of its DNA substrate. In: EMBO Journal. Volume 18, 1999, pp. 6908-6916.
• P. Friedhoff, I. Franke, G. Meiss, W. Wende, KL Krause, A. Pingoud: A similar active site for non-specific and specific endonucleases. In: Nature Structural Biology. Volume 6, 1999, pp. 112-113.
• G. Meiss, SR Scholz, C. Korn, O. Gimadutdinow, A. Pingoud: Identification of functionally relevant histidine residues in the apoptotic nuclease CAD. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 29, 2001, pp. 3901-3909.
• P. Schafer, SR Scholz, O. Gimadutdinow, LA Cymerman, JM Bujnicki, A. Ruiz-Carrilo, A. Pingoud, G. Meiss: Structural and functional characterization of mitochondrial EndoG, a sugar non-specific nuclease which plays an important role during apoptosis. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 338, 2004, pp. 217-228.
• K. Eisenschmidt, T. Lanio, A. Simoncsits, A. Jeltsch, V. Pingoud, W. Wende, A. Pingoud: Developing a programmed restriction endonuclease for highly specific DNA cleavage. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 33, 2005, pp. 7039-7047.
• A. Pingoud, W. Wende: A sliding restriction enzyme pauses. In: Structure. Volume 15, 2007, pp. 391-393.
• I. Bonnet, A. Biebricher, PL Porte, C. Loverdo, O. Benichou, R. Voituriez, C. Escude, W. Wende, A. Pingoud, P. Desbiolles: Sliding and jumping of single EcoRV restriction enzymes on non- cognate DNA. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 36, 2008, S, pp. 4118-4127.
• V. Pingoud, W. Wende, P. Friedhoff, M. Reuter, J. Alves, A. Jeltsch, L. Mones, M. Fuxreiter, A. Pingoud: On the Divalent Metal Ion Dependence of DNA Cleavage by Restriction Endonucleases of the EcoRI Family. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 393, 2009, pp. 140-160.
• B. Schierling, AJ Noel, W. Wende, LT Hien, E. Volkov, E. Kubareva, T. Oretskaya, M. Kokkinidis, A. Rompp, B. Spengler, A. Pingoud: Controlling the enzymatic activity of a restriction enzyme by light. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 107, 2010, pp. 1361-1366.
• B. Schierling, N. Dannemann, L. Gabsalilow, W. Wende, T. Cathomen, A. Pingoud: A novel zinc-finger nuclease platform with a sequence-specific cleavage module. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 40, 2012, pp. 2623-2638.
• L. Gabsalilow, B. Schierling, P. Friedhoff, A. Pingoud, W. Wende: Site- and strand-specific nicking of DNA by fusion proteins derived from MutH and I-SceI or TALE repeats. In: Nucleic Acids Research. Volume 41, 2013. doi: 10.1093 / nar / gkt1080 .

Web links

• Obituary from the Justus Liebig University

Individual evidence

1. ↑ unknown: Editorial: Alfred Pingoud (1945–2015). In: Nucleic Acids Research. 43, 2015, p. 7661, doi : 10.1093 / nar / gkv846 .