Word: proteins
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Living cells are complex chemical factories, and whatever they manufacture, they use protein molecules called enzymes as their machine tools. Scientists probing the secrets of life have learned that enzymes are long chains of amino acids linked together in definite order and tightly coiled or folded. But no one is sure just how they work. Last week Biochemist Klaus Hofmann of the University of Pittsburgh offered a glimmer of understanding by announcing the first partial synthesis of a working enzyme...
...develop the disease, though he may pass on the gene. But if both parents have it, an average of one child out of four will have a deficiency of ceruloplasmin-a little-understood blue component of the blood, in which eight atoms of copper are bound into a large protein molecule. A deficiency of ceruloplasmin leads to a piling up of copper in such sensitive organs as the liver and brain...
...discover the nature of this anatomy has been the central problem of protein chemistry, one that can be solved only by X-ray analysis. Until 1953 such analysis, however, had proved fruitful only when used to determine the atomic arrangement of simple organic compounds at least a hundred times smaller than protein molecules, which contain hundreds of amino acid residues arranged in definite sequences as polypeptide chains...
Perutz discovered in 1953 that by studying the X-ray diffraction pattern from a series of isomorphous heavy atom compounds, each having a heavy atom (such as mercury) attached to a different site on the protein molecule, the problem of discovering the molecular structure of complex proteins could be solved...
Perutz' X-ray studies of hemoglobin have not yet reached the same high degree of resolution and show far less detail than Kendrew's X-ray analysis of myoglobin, which Perutz says "opened a rich mine of stereochemical information about protein structure...