Thomas R. Cech
Thomas Robert "Tom" Cech (born December 8, 1947 in Chicago , USA ) is an American chemist . He and Sidney Altman received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989 for their work on self-splicing RNA.
Life
Cech studied and received his doctorate at John E. Hearst in chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley with the theme Characterization of the most Rapidly renaturing sequences in the main belt of the DNA mouse (Mus musculus) . First he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ; Tom Cech received his first professorship at the University of Colorado Boulder , where he still heads a research laboratory today.
Scientific work
Cech's scientific interest concerns, on the one hand, the processing of RNA, i.e. the maturation steps from the primary transcript to the functional RNA. The central discovery in 1982 was the proof of the ability of ribosomal RNA to remove an intron contained in the large rRNA from the ciliate Tetrahymena thermophila without the involvement of a protein. Thus was the first time the " Selbstspleißens " ( "self-splicing") proved.
Another area of research concerns the structure and function of telomeres , where a special enzyme called telomerase is responsible for forming the ends of linear chromosomes.
In addition to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry , Tom Cech has received other awards for his scientific work , including the Pfizer Award in Enzyme Chemistry in 1985 , the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology in 1987 and the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research in 1988 , the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize and a Gairdner Foundation International Award . Cech is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the American Philosophical Society and the Academia Europaea . From 2000 to 2009 he was President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute .
Web links
- Information from the Nobel Foundation on the 1989 award ceremony for Thomas Robert Cech (English)
- Cech Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder
- Telomeres, Telomerase, and Other Noncoding RNAs Research Abstract
- Michael Marshall: The secret of how life on earth began , on: BBC - Earth, October 31, 2016
Individual evidence
- ↑ Life data, publications and academic family tree of Thomas R. Cech at academictree.org, accessed on January 23, 2018.
- ↑ Biochemist Robert Tjian Elected as New Hughes President at hhmi.org; Retrieved January 8, 2011
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Cech, Thomas R. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Cech, Thomas Robert (full name); Cech, Tom (nickname) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American chemist, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 8, 1947 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago , USA |