Michael Levitt

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Michael Levitt (2013)

Michael Levitt (* 9. May 1947 in Pretoria ) is from South Africa originating chemist and biophysicist with American , British and Israeli citizenship. On October 9, 2013, together with Martin Karplus and Arieh Warshel, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the development of multi-scale models for complex chemical systems”.

Live and act

Levitt was born in Pretoria, South Africa to a Jewish family from Plungė, Lithuania; His father was Lithuanian and his mother is of Czech descent. Levitt studied physics from 1964 at King's College London with a bachelor's degree in 1967 and received his doctorate in biophysics (conformal analysis of proteins) at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1971 . As a post-doctoral student , he was an EMBO Fellow at the Weizmann Institute for Science with Shneior Lifson from 1972 to 1974 . From 1974 to 1979 he was a scientist at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge and from 1977 to 1979 visiting scientist with Francis Crick at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California . From 1979 he was professor of physical chemistry at the Weizmann Institute and from 1987 professor of structural biology at Stanford University . From 1993 to 2004 he headed the structural biology department at Stanford.

He was visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute, the University of Paris and at the École Normale Superieure (Blaise Pascal Professur).

He made important contributions to computer simulation, for example of the movement of proteins in solutions and protein folding . In addition to proteins, he also dealt with computer simulations for the structural biology of RNA and DNA and advanced methods of genome sequence analysis with the computer to obtain information about the proteins encoded in the genome . Partly he worked with Arieh Warshel.

He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences in 2002 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010 .

After analyzing the data available to him on coronavirus disease-2019, Levitt published his research results, criticized gross errors and the rigorous measures taken by some countries in the fight against corona, and described them as dangerous and unnecessary.

He has been married since 1968 and has three children.

Fonts

  • with S. Lifson: Refinement of Protein Conformations Using a Macromolecular Energy Minimization Procedure. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 46, 1969, pp. 269-279.
  • Detailed Molecular Model for Transfer Ribonucleic Acid. in: Nature. Volume 224, 1969, pp. 759-763.
  • with A. Warshel: Computer Simulation of Protein Folding. In: Nature. Volume 253, 1975, pp. 694-698.
  • with A. Warshel: Theoretical Studies of Enzymic Reactions: Dielectric, Electrostatic and Steric Stabilization of the Carbonium Ion in the Reaction of Lysozyme. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 103, 1976, pp. 227-249.
  • with C. Chothia: Structural Patterns in Globular Proteins. In: Nature. Volume 261, 1976, pp. 552-558.
  • Simplified Representation of Protein Conformations for Rapid Simulation of Protein Folding. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 104, 1976, pp. 59-107.
  • with JT Finch, LC Lutter, D. Rhodes, RS Brown, B. Rushton, A. Klug: Structure of the Nucleosome Core Particles of Chromatin. In: Nature. Volume 269, 1977, pp. 29-35.
  • with A. Jack: Refinement of Large Structures by Simultaneous Minimization of Energy and R Factor. In: Acta Crystallogr. Volume A34, 1978, pp. 931-935.
  • with J. Janin, S. Wodak, B. Maigret: The Conformation of Amino Acid Side Chains in Proteins. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 125, 1978, pp. 357-386.
  • Protein Conformation, Dynamics and Folding by Computer Simulation. In: Annual Review of Biophysics and Bioengineering. Volume 11, 1982, pp. 251-271.
  • Protein Folding by Restrained Energy Minimization and Molecular Dynamics. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 170, 1983, pp. 723-764.
  • with R. Sharon: Accurate Simulation of Protein Dynamics in Solution. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences . Volume 85, 1988, pp. 7557-7561.
  • with C. Chothia, AM Lesk, A. Tramontano, SJ Smith-Gill, G. Air, S. Sheriff, EA Padlan, D. Davies, WR Tulip, PM Colman: The Conformations of Immunoglobulin Hypervariable Regions. In: Nature. Volume 342, 1989, pp. 877-883.
  • with C. Queen, WP Schneider, HE Selick, PW Payne, NF Landolfi, JF Duncan, NM Avdalovic, RP Junghans, TA Waldmann: A Humanized Antibody that Binds to the IL-2 Receptor. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Volume 86, 1989, pp. 10029-10033.
  • with V. Daggett: Realistic Simulation of Native Protein Dynamics in Solution and Beyond. In: Annual Review of Biophysics and Biomolecular Structure. Volume 22, 1993, pp. 353-380.
  • with V. Daggett: Protein Unfolding Pathways Explored Through Molecular Dynamics Simulations. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 232, 1993, pp. 600-618.
  • with DA Hinds: From structure to sequence and back again. In: Journal of Molecular Biology. Volume 258, 1996, pp. 201-209.
  • with M. Gerstein, ES Huang, S. Subbiah, J. Tsai: Protein Folding: The End-Game. In: Annual Review of Biochemistry. Volume 66, 1997, pp. 549-579.
  • with Patrice Koehl: Protein topology and stability define the space of allowed sequences. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Volume 99, 2002, pp. 1280-1285.
  • with Y. Xia: Simulating Protein Evolution in Sequence and Structure Space. In: Current Opinion in Structural Biology. Volume 14, 2004, pp. 202-207.
  • Nature of the protein universe. In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Volume 106, 2009, pp. 11079-11084.
  • with M. Gerstein: Simulating water and the proteins of life. In: Scientific American . November 1998

literature

Web links

Commons : Michael Levitt  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
  • Michael Levitt at Stanford University School of Medicine
  • CV at Stanford University School of Medicine
  • CV (PDF; 38 kB) at welch1.org

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Press release from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences on the 2013 Nobel Prize
  2. ^ Foreign Minister congratulates Litvak Levitt on winning Nobel Prize. In: delfi.lt. October 11, 2013, archived from the original on October 13, 2013 ; accessed on October 7, 2017 .
  3. ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Michael Levitt at academictree.org, accessed on March 7, 2018.
  4. ↑ Example: Michael Levitt, Andrea Scaiewicz, Francesco Zonta: Predicting the Trajectory of Any COVID19 Epidemic From the Best Straight Line. MedRxiv , June 30, 2020, accessed July 18, 2020 .
  5. ↑ Pierre Heumann: Nobel laureate in chemistry, Michael Levitt, criticizes gross mistakes in the fight against the virus. , in: Jüdische Allgemeine, May 20, 2020.
personal data
SURNAME Levitt, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION South African chemist
DATE OF BIRTH May 9, 1947
PLACE OF BIRTH Pretoria , South Africa