Kurt Wüthrich of The Scripps Research Institute Wins 2002 Nobel
Prize in Chemistry
Second Nobel Prize in a Row for TSRI
Kurt Wüthrich, Ph.D., who is Cecil H. and Ida M. Green Visiting
Professor of Structural Biology at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI)
and a member of TSRI's Skaggs Institute for Chemical Biology; and Professor
of Biophysics at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
(ETHZ), Switzerland, was awarded the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry today
for applying the technique of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to solving
the structures of biological macromolecules.
Biological macromolecules—the DNA, proteins, sugars, and lipids
of life—make up all the important structures of the cell, but they
are much too small to study under a microscope. Determining the structure
of these macromolecules through NMR was pioneered by Wüthrich and
allows scientists to "see" what they look like, to study and probe their
structures, and to design drugs that inhibit them. Most recently, NMR
structures have been critical in the design of drugs to treat, for instance,
cancer and HIV.
"We are thrilled that Dr. Wüthrich has received this recognition,"
says TSRI President Richard Lerner, M.D. "He is in the forefront of his
field and he continues to push the boundaries of structural biology in
new and important ways."
Awarded annually by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for achievements
in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, economics, and peace, the
prize recognizes individuals who, as stipulated in Alfred Nobel's will,
"have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind." Each prize carries a
cash award of roughly one million dollars. Last year, K. Barry Sharpless,
Ph.D., W.M. Keck Professor of Chemistry at TSRI and member of TSRI's Skaggs
Institute for Chemical Biology, was awarded the 2001 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
for the development of catalytic asymmetric synthesis.
"Two Nobel Prizes in two years is a remarkable endorsement of what TSRI
is about—attracting the very best scientific minds and providing
them the resources and freedom they need to produce the very best research,"
Lerner says. "The prizes also underscore the extraordinary quality of
the TSRI structural biology and chemistry programs."
Wüthrich, who currently operates a laboratory at TSRI and is scheduled
to become a full-time faculty member in 2004, was awarded half this year's
prize in chemistry specifically "for his development of nuclear magnetic
resonance spectroscopy for determining the three-dimensional structure
of biological macromolecules in solution," according to the Nobel web
site. John B. Fenn of the Virginia Commonwealth University in the United
States and Koichi Tanaka of the Shimadzu Corporation in Japan share the
other half "for their development of soft desorption ionisation methods
for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules."
In 1982, Wüthrich's group published a series of four papers that
outlined a framework for NMR structure determination of proteins. In 1984,
he published the first protein structure determined by NMR—that of
the protein bull seminal protease inhibitor. He is author of the definitive
book on the subject, "NMR of Proteins and Nucleic Acids" (1986).
In addition to developing methodology, Wüthrich has devoted his
research to solving structures of biological molecules. He has solved
more than 50 novel NMR structures of proteins and nucleic acids, including
the immunosuppression system cyclophilin A–cyclosporin A, the homeodomain
operator DNA transcriptional regulation system, and the murine, human,
and bovine prion proteins. Misfolded prion proteins are believed to be
the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, and
a form of the disease in humans, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease.
Wüthrich has solved numerous protein pheromone structures from
Mediterranean sea creatures and pheromone-binding proteins from other
organisms, such as silkworms. He is also looking at "chaperonin" systems
like GroEL—the very large protein complex that monitors the folding
of newly synthesized proteins.
He also has been looking at ways of solving membrane protein structures,
which are some of the least solved of all the relevant molecular structures
in biology. Less than one half of one percent of the structures contained
in the Brookhaven National Laboratory Protein Data Bank are of integral
membrane proteins, despite the fact that over a third of all proteins
in the body are in the membrane.
Most recently, Wüthrich pioneered the new technique of transverse
relaxation-optimized spectroscopy NMR (TROSY), which extends several-fold
the size limit of structures that can be solved with NMR. This made it
possible for the first time for investigators to use NMR to solve many
important biological structures—such as large proteins and protein/protein,
protein/DNA or protein/lipid complexes—that are impossible to investigate
with conventional NMR, which cannot solve structures larger than 50,000
daltons. A dalton is equivalent to the mass of one hydrogen atom.
"We can now do reasonably detailed structural investigations of proteins
in structures of size up to about 150,000 daltons," says Wüthrich.
He has also pioneered other techniques, such as cross-correlated relaxation-enhanced
polarization transfer (CRINEPT), which when combined with TROSY, result
in highly effective experiments for very large structures. "We can go
up to one million [daltons], essentially," Wüthrich says.
Wüthrich did his undergraduate training at the University of Bern,
Switzerland, receiving a Licentiat in chemistry, physics and mathematics
in 1962. In 1964, he was awarded a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University
of Basel, Switzerland, (studying with Professor S. Fallab), where he also
completed a year of postdoctoral training. After an additional two years
of postdoctoral training at the University of California, Berkeley, Wüthrich
worked for two years as a member of the technical staff at Bell Telephone
Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. In 1969, he moved to the Eidgenössische
Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETHZ), Switzerland, where he is currently
Professor of Biophysics.
Wüthrich is a Member of the European Molecular Biology Organization;
a Member of the Academia Europaea; a Foreign Associate of the National
Academy of Sciences in the United States; an Honorary Fellow of The National
Academy of Sciences, India; a Foreign Honorary Member of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences; an Honorary Member of the Japanese Biochemical
Society and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of
Science.
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Kurt Wüthrich has won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Photo by Alan McPhee.
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