Stephen Kent (chemist)

Stephen Brian Henry Kent (born December 12, 1945 in Wellington ) is a New Zealand biochemist and molecular biologist.

Kent graduated from Victoria University with a bachelor's degree in 1968 and Massey University with a master's degree in 1970, and received his PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Berkeley . From 1974 to 1977 he conducted research at Rockefeller University (with Robert Bruce Merrifield ), where he became an assistant professor in 1977 and stayed until 1981. From 1983 to 1989 he was Senior Research Assistant at Caltech , in 1989 he became a professor at Bond University and in 1991 at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, which he was until 1996. From 1997 to 2000 he was Chief Scientist at Gryphon Sciences. From 2001 he was a professor at the University of Chicago and from 2003 to 2009 director of the Institute for Biophysical Dynamics there.

He deals with the total synthesis of proteins and was a pioneer there in the mid-1990s of native chemical ligation and other methods of chemical ligation of proteins (synthesis of large proteins from smaller peptides which are prepared with functional groups, for example). He is also developing novel synthetic proteins and modified biological proteins. Among other things, he developed mirror molecules (D proteins) from the L versions that normally occur in nature. They have potential application in the immune defense against the natural protein produced by viruses, for example (and, in contrast to this, are not dangerous for the cell and are resistant to natural proteases). In addition, they are used for X-ray crystallography of proteins and thus their structure elucidation (for which crystals first have to be produced, which may be easier with the mirror molecules, racemic crystallography).

In 2017 he received the Prelog Medal . He also received the American Chemical Society's Ralph F. Hirschmann Award in Peptide Chemistry in 1994, the Protein Society's Kaiser Award in 2002, and the American Peptide Society's Merrifield Award in 2009. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2000).

Fonts

• with PE Dawson: Synthesis of native proteins by chemical ligation, Annual Review of Biochemistry, Volume 69, 2000, pp. 923-960.

Web links

• Homepage, University of Chicago