Pehr Edman
Pehr Victor Edman (born April 14, 1916 in Stockholm , † March 19, 1977 ) was a Swedish biochemist.
In 1950 he developed the Edman degradation , named after him , which enables the sequence of the amino acid building blocks in proteins to be determined.
Life
Edman was born in Stockholm . After finishing school, he began studying medicine at the Karolinska Institutet in 1935 . His interest lay in basic research . After graduating, he stayed at the Karolinska Institute, where he worked in the laboratory of Erik Jorpes (1894–1973) for his doctorate in medicine. The Second World War interrupted his research because he was called up to serve in the medical service of the Swedish Army. After the war, Edman received his doctorate in 1946 with a thesis on the purification and analysis of angiotensin from bovine blood.
Inspired by the new knowledge gained at that time that proteins are chemically uniform substances with a defined molar mass , charge and structure , Edman devoted himself to the development of a method with which one can decipher the sequence of the amino acid building blocks, the amino acid sequence of the protein.
After completing his doctorate, he went to the USA for a year as part of a research fellowship to the Northrop-Kunitz Laboratory at the Rockefeller Institute of Medical Research in Princeton. He then returned to Sweden to accept an assistant professorship at Lund University . In 1950 he published the first work in which he presented the principle of his reaction sequence for sequence determination, which later became known as the Edman degradation. Until his death, his main interest was the perfecting of this method with the aim of being able to determine longer and longer sequence sections with smaller sample quantities.
Edman went to Australia in 1957 and became director of St. Vincent's School of Medical Research. Here in 1967, together with his assistant Geoffrey Begg, he developed the first protein sequenator of an automatic machine that can automatically perform the repetitive steps of Edman degradation.
In 1972 Edman moved to the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried near Munich, where he further improved the efficiency of automatic sequencing. Edman's second wife, Agnes Henschen, whom he married in 1968, also worked there. Agnes Henschen used Edman's sophisticated method to determine the sequence of fibrinogen , an important protein for blood clotting .
In 1974 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the Royal Society .
In 1977 Pehr Edman died of a brain tumor after a brief coma.
Individual evidence
- ^ Biographical data from Pehr Edman in: A History of Biochemistry: Selected Topics in the History of Biochemistry. Personal recollections. VII: Selected Topics in the History of Biochemistry: 42 (Comprehensive Biochemistry) , by Giorgio Semenza , AJ Turner, Elsevier Science & Technology, 2003, p. 105.
- ^ Entry on Edman, Pehr Victor (1916-1977) in the archives of the Royal Society , London
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Edman, Pehr |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Edman, Pehr Victor (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Swedish biochemist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | April 14, 1916 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Stockholm , Sweden |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 19, 1977 |