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Manfred Eigen - The exciting new field of allosteric enzymes (32/113)

241 views · Published 19 July 2017 · 2:29 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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Manfred Eigen (1927-2019) was a German biophysical chemist, best known for his work on measuring fast chemical reactions called relaxation techniques. He was co-recipient of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [Listener: Ruthild Winkler-Oswatitch; date recorded: 1997]

TRANSCRIPT: Jacques Monod and François Jacob had the idea of allosteric reaction control by enzymes, which meant you can switch on and off the reactivity of an enzyme molecule by binding another ligand. The ligand might be the substrate itself, which in addition bind... it might be the product of the reaction or it might be some other effector. A typical allosteric protein, not an enzyme but you might say enzyme...

[RW-O] Honoris causa?

... honoris causa is the haemoglobin molecule, that molecule which binds the oxygen and transports it to the places in the organism where it has to be burnt... where the food has to be burnt. So in other words the molecule in the lung, where oxygen comes in, must take up as much as possible oxygen, so it must have a high binding capacity while, when it comes to the cell places where the oxygen has to be given off, it has to have a low affinity to oxygen in order to give it. So you see that is a typical protein in which the control of the reaction plays some role.

Now we, when I say we again it was Kaspar Kirschner, who came from Feodor Lynen, from Munich, to me, is a biochemist, he choose another enzyme, glyceraldehyde phosphate dehydrogenase, and it turned out that this enzyme behaved exactly according to a mechanism which was proposed by Jacques Monod together with Jean-Pierre Changeux and Jeffries Wyman. In 1965, '66 there were several papers on this exciting new field of allosteric enzymes. There was this paper by Monod, Changeux and Wyman, there was another paper by Koshland, and there was our experimental study.

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