Hiroshi Nikaidō

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Hiroshi Nikaidō ( Japanese 二階 堂 溥 , Nikaidō Hiroshi ; born March 26, 1932 in Tokyo Prefecture ) is a Japanese microbiologist and biochemist. He is a leading expert on bacterial cell walls.

Life

Nikaidō graduated from Keiō University in Japan as a medical doctor in 1955 , then was a lecturer there and received his doctorate in microbiology in 1961. In 1961 he was at the Institute for Protein Research at the University of Osaka and from 1962 at the Harvard Medical School , where he became Assistant Professor in 1965. In 1969 he became an Associate Professor and then Professor of Microbiology at the University of California, Berkeley . Since 1990 he has been Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology there.

It deals with the biochemistry and structure of the cell wall and cell membrane of bacteria, especially gram-negative bacteria with two outer walls over the cytoplasmic membrane ( murein envelope and outer membrane ). He found that the lipopolysaccharides (LPS) of the outer membrane prevented the uptake of many substances (such as hydrophobic antibiotics from other bacteria) and discovered channels in the outer membrane of gram-negative bacteria (such as E. coli ), which he called porins and which selectively select certain substances let through. In his laboratory he examined the special pump systems with a broad substrate specificity that many bacteria have to pump molecules out of the cell directly to the outside and that play a role in antibiotic resistance ( efflux pump ). In mycobacteria , he found a special cell wall structure with long fatty acid chains, which leads to poor fluidity, so that dissolved antibiotics can hardly penetrate the cell.

In 1969 he received the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize and in 1984 the Hoechst Roussel Prize. He has been an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005 and of the National Academy of Sciences since 2009 .

He has been married since 1963 and has two children.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
personal data
SURNAME Nikaidō, Hiroshi
ALTERNATIVE NAMES 二階 堂 溥 (Japanese)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Japanese microbiologist and biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 26, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Tokyo prefecture