Robert Huber

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Robert Huber

Technical University Munich
Known forCyanobacteria Crystallography
Awards
Scientific career
Fields
postdoc)[3][4][5]
Websitewww.biochem.mpg.de/en/eg/huber

Robert Huber (German pronunciation:

Nobel laureate.[6][7][8][9][10] known for his work crystallizing an intramembrane protein important in photosynthesis
and subsequently applying X-ray crystallography to elucidate the protein's structure.

Education and early life

He was born on 20 February 1937 in

organic compounds
.

Career

In 1971 he became a director at the

Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry where his team developed methods for the crystallography of proteins
.

In 1988 he received the

chloroplasts of higher plants.[citation needed
]

In 2006, he took up a post at the Cardiff University to spearhead the development of Structural Biology at the university on a part-time basis.[13]

Since 2005 he has been doing research at the Center for medical biotechnology of the University of Duisburg-Essen.

Huber was one of the original editors of the Encyclopedia of Analytical Chemistry.

Awards and honours

In 1977 Huber was awarded the

Foreign Member of the Royal Society (ForMemRS) in 1999.[2] His certificate of election reads:

Huber has built up, led and still leads the most productive protein crystallography laboratory in Europe. His own contributions to crystallography, made over a period of some 25 years, are prodigious. For his PhD thesis he solved the chemical formula of the important insect hormone edtyson which had eluded the chemists. He then demonstrated that the tertiary fold of the polypeptide chain in the haemoglobin of the fly larva chironomus closely resembled that in Kendrew's sperm whale myoglobin

, indicating for the first time that this fold had been preserved throughout evolution.

Huber's next achievement was the solution of the structure of trypsin inhibitor and the demonstration that in its complex with trypsin it mimicked the tetrahedral transition state of the enzyme's substrate. Since then he has determined the structures of many other proteinases, their inactive precursors and their inhibitors, and has established himself as the world authority in this field. Outstanding structures are those of procarboxypeptidase, which led to the discovery of the remarkable activation mechanism of this enzyme, and of the complex of thrombin with hirudin, which showed the molecular mechanism of inhibition of blood clotting by this leech toxin.

In parallel with this work, Huber solved the structures of several

immunoglobulin
fragments. He was the first to determine the structure of the complement-activating F-fragment, which was also the first variable and the first constant domains in Fab-fragments.

Huber's structure of citrate synthase revealed a striking example of a conformational change undergone by an enzyme on combination with its substrate by a process of induced fit. Huber shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 with Michel and Deisenhofer for their determination of the remarkable and supremely important structures of the photochemical reaction centre of Rhodopseudomonas viridis and of phycocyanin, the light harvesting protein of the blue-green alga Mastiglocadus laminosus. This protein binds linear tetrapyrroles in a tertiary fold reminiscent of the globins, which brought Huber back full circle to his first structure, erythrocruerin, Huber has also determined the structures of several copper-containing electron-transfer proteins, including that of ascorbate oxidase, and of other metallo-enzymes. These studies have thrown new light on electron-transfer systems and on zinc coordination in proteins. He has also solved the structure of an important class of calcium binding proteins – the annexins. Finally his very accurate structures have provided important insights into the different degrees of mobility within protein molecules.

Huber has published some 400 papers.[1]

Personal life

Huber is married and has four children.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ a b "Certificate of election EC/1999/43: Huber, Robert". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2019-07-08.
  2. ^ a b "Professor Robert Huber ForMemRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-10-26.
  3. S2CID 4193312
    .
  4. .
  5. .
  6. .
  7. .
  8. .
  9. ^ Robert Huber autobiographical information at www.nobel.org
  10. PMID 9537320
    .
  11. .
  12. .
  13. ^ Smith, Alexandra (2006-10-24). "Nobel chemist joins Cardiff University". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 September 2015.
  14. ^ "Otto-Warburg-Medal". GBM. Retrieved 12 January 2014.
  15. ^ "Superstars of Science". Retrieved 12 January 2015.
  16. ^ "Curriculum vitae". Max Planck Institute. Retrieved 11 January 2015.

External links