Sidney Altman

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Sidney Altman
Crystal structure of RNase P with tRNA substrate (green)

Sidney "Sid" Altman (born May 7, 1939 in Montreal , Canada ) is a Canadian physicist and biochemist. Together with Thomas R. Cech, he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for discovering the catalytic properties of RNA .

Life

Sid Altman grew up as a child of an immigrant family and studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology , later biophysics at the University of Colorado , where he received his PhD in 1967 . He later became a professor at Yale University , where he now teaches. In 1987 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , and in 1988 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1990 he was accepted into the US National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society . In 2016 he received the Lomonosov Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences .

His pioneering research on RNA began at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology by Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Cambridge, UK.

While investigating the complicated process sequence in which the coded information of the DNA leads to the production of the corresponding proteins with the help of six RNA molecules , Altman discovered the enzyme RNase P , which splits off the end pieces from one of the intermediate RNA molecules. After ten years of research, Altman was able to prove that the enzyme examined was not a protein, as usual, but a combination of a piece of RNA and a protein. The piece of RNA was essential for the specific catalytic effect.

This is important because the RNA piece has a much simpler structure than conventional enzymes. This showed an approximate way how archetypes of life could have formed from relatively simple molecules.

The mechanisms he studied could also prove valuable in combating cold viruses. These also essentially consist of RNA.

Web links

Commons : Sidney Altman  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Fellows of the AAAS: Sidney Altman. American Association for the Advancement of Science, accessed January 23, 2018 .
  2. ^ Member Directory: Sidney Altman. National Academy of Sciences, accessed January 23, 2018 .