Roderick MacKinnon
Roderick MacKinnon (born February 19, 1956 in Burlington , Massachusetts ) is an American biochemist and physician and professor of molecular neurobiology and biophysics at Rockefeller University . Together with Peter Agre he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2003 for his elucidation of the permeation mechanism in potassium channels .
Life
Roderick MacKinnon grew up in Burlington and first enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in Boston . However, after only one year, he moved to the more prestigious Brandeis University to advance his studies. He received a bachelor's degree in biochemistry there in 1978 while studying the transport of calcium across the cell membrane for his thesis under Christopher Miller . At Brandeis University he also met his future wife and work colleague Alice Lee.
After graduating from Brandeis, he entered the medical program at Tufts University . In 1982 he completed his training as a doctor there and then worked as an internist at the Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. But this work did not enable him to pursue his dream career and so he returned in 1986 to Christopher Miller in Brandeis as a post-doctoral student . In 1989 he became an assistant professor at Harvard University , where he studied the interactions of the potassium channel with a specific toxin from scorpion venom and taught himself the methods of crystal structure analysis .
In 1996 he was appointed professor and director of the Laboratory for Molecular Neurobiology and Biophysics at Rockefeller University . There he began to elucidate the structure of the potassium channels, which are particularly important for the nervous system and enable potassium ions to pass through the cell membrane. Ion channels are important for the functioning of the nervous system and muscles , among other things . The action potential in nerve cells is generated when an ion channel on the surface of a nerve cell is opened by a chemical signal sent out by a nearby nerve cell, whereupon an electrical voltage pulse is propagated along the nerve cell surface by causing a whole series of ion channels can be opened and closed.
Before MacKinnon, the exact structure of the channels and how they worked was unknown and left to speculation. But after only two years at Rockefeller University, in 1998, despite all the obstacles that made the structure elucidation of integral membrane proteins almost impossible, he was able to publish the exact three-dimensional structure of a potassium channel in bacteria. This also explains the high selectivity of these channels for potassium ions - the smaller sodium ions cannot pass through. The scientific journal Science described this achievement as one of the greatest scientific success stories of 1998.
His work was mainly carried out at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) at Cornell University and at the National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory .
In 1998 MacKinnon received the W. Alden Spencer Award and in 1999 he shared the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research with Clay Armstrong and Bertil Hille - one of the greatest awards for a scientist in the field of medicine. In 2000 he was elected to the American National Academy of Sciences and has since received numerous other awards, including the Rosenstiel Award in 2000 , the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize in 2001 and the Gairdner Foundation International Award , and the Louisa-Gross-Horwitz in 2003 Prize and in 2005 the Hans Neurath Award from the Protein Society. In 2003 MacKinnon received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry . In 2005 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society .
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 2003 award ceremony for Roderick MacKinnon
- Nobel Prize Lecture Potassium Channels and the Atomic Basis of Selective Ion Conduction (eng)
- Website of his research group at Rockefeller University
Individual evidence
- ↑ Roderick MacKinnon, Steven L. Cohen, Anling Kuo, Alice Lee, Brian T. Chait: Structural Conservation in Prokaryotic and Eukaryotic Potassium Channels . In: Science. Volume 280, No. 5360, April 3, 1998, pp. 106-109, PMID 9525854
- ↑ Declan A. Doyle, João Morais Cabral, Richard A. Pfuetzner, Anling Kuo, Jacqueline M. Gulbis, Steven L. Cohen, Brian T. Chait, Roderick MacKinnon: The Structure of the Potassium Channel. Molecular Basis of K + Conduction and Selectivity . In: Science. Volume 280, No. 5360, April 3, 1998, pp. 69-77, PMID 9525859
- ^ Science. Volume 282, No. 5397, December 18, 1998, pp. 2157-2161, doi : 10.1126 / science.282.5397.2157
- ^ Member History: Roderick MacKinnon. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 23, 2018 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | MacKinnon, Roderick |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American biochemist and physician, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry |
| DATE OF BIRTH | 19th February 1956 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Burlington , Massachusetts |