Seymour Jonathan Singer

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Seymour Jonathan Singer (born May 23, 1924 in New York City , † February 2, 2017 in La Jolla ) was an American molecular biologist and professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).

Life

Singer graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's degree in 1943 and received his doctorate in 1947 from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn . He then worked in Linus Pauling's laboratory at Caltech until 1948 . He was then at the US Public Health Service and in 1951 became an assistant professor in the chemistry department at Yale University . In 1957 he became an associate professor and in 1960 professor at Yale. In 1961 he became a professor at UCSD in the Faculty of Biology, which he helped to build up with its founder David Bonner as his right-hand man and which he became chairman in 1964 after Bonner's death. From 1988 until his retirement in 1995 he was a University Professor at UCSD (a special honor) and from 1976 to 1991 he was a research professor at the American Cancer Society .

Together with Harvey Itano and Pauling in Pauling's laboratory at Caltech in 1949, Singer found the cause of sickle cell anemia - an altered form of red blood cells - and for the first time attributed an illness directly to a change in a molecule. The difference in the hemoglobin of the two red blood cells was shown in gel electrophoresis, and Singer and colleagues suspected a change in the amic acid composition. At the same time, the geneticist James Van Gundia Neel (1915-2000) found the inheritance pattern of the disease and in 1956 Vernon Ingram (1924-2006) found through protein sequencing that the difference to normal hemoglobin was only in one amino acid (a glutamic acid was in the pathogenic form Valine replaced), which also confirmed the assumption of Singer and colleagues. The work of Singer, Pauling and Itano is considered a classic.

At Yale University, he developed the ferritin antibody for cell staining in electron microscopy (where it was the first such electron-rich reagent).

At UCSD he published fundamental work on the conformation of membrane proteins in the mid-1960s. This resulted in the basic fluid mosaic model for the mode of action of proteins in the cell membrane, for example in signal conduction and transport. He also contributed to the elucidation of the interaction of the cytoskeleton with the cell membrane.

In the last 20 years of his life he dealt with Nazneen Dewji with a novel approach to Alzheimer's disease (interaction of two membrane proteins, amyloid precursor protein and a presenilin ).

He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1969), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1971) and received the EB Wilson Medal of the American Society for Cell Biology in 1991 .

In 1959 he was a Guggenheim Fellow.

Fonts (selection)

  • The splendid feast of reason, University of California Press 2001

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ D. Lowe, Das Chemiebuch, Librero 2017, p. 354
  2. ↑ L. Pauling, Harvey A. Itano, SJ Singer, Ibert C. Wells: Sickle Cell Anemia, a Molecular Disease, Science, Volume 110, 1949, pp. 543-548
  3. ↑ John Lenard, SJ Singer: Protein conformation in cell membrane preparations as studied by optical rotatory dispersion and circular dichroism, Proc Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 56, 1966, pp. 1828-1835
  4. ^ J. Lenard, SJ Singer: Structure of membranes: Reaction of red cell membranes with phospholipase C, Science, Volume 159, 1968, S-. 738
  5. ^ Garth Nicolson , Singer, The Fluid Mosaic Model of the Structure of Cell Membanes, Science, Volume 175, 1972, pp. 720-731
personal data
SURNAME Singer, Seymour Jonathan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American cell and molecular biologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 23, 1924
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH 2nd February 2017
Place of death La Jolla