Cédric Blanpain: ISSCR's outstanding young investigator for 2012

Cédric Blanpain from the Interdisciplinary Research Institute, Université libre de Bruxelles earned the 2012 ISSCR-University of Pittsburgh Outstanding Young Investigator Award for his exceptional achievements as an early-career stem cell researcher.     

Q & A

Gregory A. Petsko is Gyula and Katica Tauber Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry and Director of the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center at Brandeis University. He did his undergraduate work at Princeton and his graduate work as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. He held faculty positions at Wayne State University School of Medicine and MIT before moving to Brandeis in 1990. A structural biologist, he is best known for his work, together with his colleague Dagmar Ringe, on the structural basis of enzyme catalytic power and the role of protein dynamics in protein function. He writes a regular opinion column for the journal Genome Biology.     

A Conversation About Health Care Reform

Professor Victor R. Fuchs is the Henry J. Kaiser Jr Professor at Stanford (California) University, where he applies economic analysis to social problems of national concern, with special emphasis on health and medical care. He holds joint appointments in the Economics Department and the School of Medicine''s Department of Health Research and Policy. Professor Fuchs is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the first economist to receive the Distinguished Investigator Award of the Association for Health Services Research and has also received the Baxter Foundation Health Services Research Prize. Professor Fuchs is president-elect of the American Economic Association. His latest book, The Future of Health Policy, was published by Harvard University Press in 1993.The following edited conversation between Professor Fuchs and Linda Hawes Clever, MD, Editor of the journal, took place on April 8, 1994.     

Q & A: Alexander Varshavsky

Alexander Varshavsky is Smits Professor of Cell Biology at the California Institute of Technology. He moved to Caltech in 1992, after 15 years at the MIT's Department of Biology. He was born and educated in Russia, and was 30 at the time of his emigration to the U.S. in 1977. In Russia, and for a while at MIT, he studied the structure and replication of chromosomes. Over the last 24 years, the work of his laboratory focused on the ubiquitin system and closely related fields. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and has received the Gairdner Award, the Lasker Award, the General Motors Sloan Prize, the Wolf Prize, the Horwitz Prize, and the Wilson Medal.     

From the new Editor-in-Chief

<正>It is both an honor and pleasure to have been appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Virologica Sinica from this volume.Professor Xinwen CHEN,who has dedicated to serve the journal as the Editor-in-Chief for15 years,concluded his term of service in the last volume.I would like to thank Prof.CHEN for his long-standing     

Four Children and Yale: The Making of a Human Geneticist: The Grover Powers Lecture 2014

Dr. Leon E. Rosenberg delivered the following presentation as the Grover Powers Lecturer on May 14, 2014, which served as the focal point of his return to his “adult home” as a Visiting Professor in the Department of Pediatrics. Grover F. Powers, MD, was one of the most influential figures in American Pediatrics and certainly the leader who created the modern Department of Pediatrics at Yale when he was recruited in 1921 from Johns Hopkins and then served as its second chairman from 1927 to 1951. Dr. Powers was an astute clinician and compassionate physician and fostered and shaped the careers of countless professors, chairs, and outstanding pediatricians throughout the country. This lectureship has continued yearly since it first honored Dr. Powers in 1956. The selection of Dr. Rosenberg for this honor recognizes his seminal role at Yale and throughout the world in the fostering and cultivating of the field of human genetics. Dr. Rosenberg served as the inaugural Chief of a joint Division of Medical Genetics in the Departments of Pediatrics and Internal Medicine; he became Chair when this attained Departmental status. Then he served as Dean of the Medical School from 1984 to 1991, before he became President of the Pharmaceutical Research Institute at Bristol-Myers Squibb and later Senior Molecular Biologist and Professor at Princeton University, until his recent retirement. Dr. Rosenberg has received numerous honors that include the Borden Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the McKusick Leadership Award from the American Society for Human Genetics, and election to the Institute of Medicine and the National Academy of Sciences.     

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: Thomas A. Steitz and the structure of the ribosome

Over the past 200 years, there have been countless groundbreaking discoveries in biology and medicine at Yale University. However, one particularly noteworthy discovery with profoundly important and broad consequences happened here in just the past two decades. In 2009, Thomas Steitz, the Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for "studies of the structure and function of the ribosome," along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Ada E. Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science. This article covers the historical context of Steitz's important discovery, the techniques his laboratory used to study the ribosome, and the impact that this research has had, and will have, on the future of biological and medical research.     

The Per Brinck Oikos award 2011 – Michel Loreau

The Per Brinck Oikos Award recognizes extraordinary and important contributions to the science of ecology. Particular emphasis is given to scientific work aimed at synthesis that has led to novel and original research in unexplored or neglected fields, or to bridging gaps between ecological disciplines. Such achievements typically require theoretical innovation and devlopment as well as imaginative observational or experimental work, all of which will be valid grounds for recognition. The Per Brinck Oikos Award is delivered in honor of the Swedish ecologist Professor Per Brinck who has played an instrumental role for the development and recognition of the science of ecology in the Nordic countries, especially as serving as the Editor‐in‐Chief for Oikos for many years. The award is delivered annually and the laureate receives a modest prize sum, a diploma and a Swedish artisan glassware. The Award is sponsored by the Per Brinck Foundation at the editorial office of the journal Oikos and Wiley/Blackwell Publishing.     

Q & A. Carl R. Woese. [interview

Carl R. Woese was born and raised in Syracuse, New York. His undergraduate training was at Amherst College (AB 1950) and graduate work at Yale University (PhD 1953). He is currently the Stanley O. Ikenberry University Professor and Center for Advanced Study Professor of Microbiology at the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), where he has been for the past forty years. He was trained as a biophysicist and molecular biologist. He views himself as a molecular biologist in search of Biology. Consequently, his career has been devoted to using molecular methods to approach evolutionary problems. His most notable accomplishments have been determining the universal phylogenetic tree, through molecular sequence analysis, and the discovery of the Archaea, the so-called ‘third form’ of life. For these he has received numerous awards, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Award, the Leeuwenhoek Medal 1990 (Netherlands Royal Academy), the Waksman Award (National Academy of Science USA), and the Crafoord Prize (Swedish Royal Academy). At present he works on the evolution of cellular organization.     

Roderick K. Clayton: a life,and some personal recollections

Roderick K. Clayton passed away on October 23, 2011, at the age of 89, shortly after the plan for this dedicatory issue of Photosynthesis Research had been hatched. I had just written a lengthy letter to him to re-establish contact after a hiatus of 2 or 3 years, and to suggest that I visit him to talk about his life. It isn’t clear whether he saw the letter or not, but it was found at his home in Santa Rosa, California. Fortunately, Rod has written two memoirs for Photosynthesis Research that not only cover much of his research on reaction centers (Photosynth Res 73:63–71, 2002) but also provide a humorous and honest look at his personal life (Photosynth Res 19:207–224, 1988). I cannot hope to improve on these and will try, instead, to fill in some of the gaps that Rod’s own writing has left, and offer some of my own personal recollections over the more recent years.     

Localization of a symbiotic fix region on Rhizobium meliloti pSym megaplasmid more than 200 kilobases from the nod-nif region

Summary We have established the HindIII physical map of a cloned 290 kilobase fragment of the Rhizobium meliloti 2011 pSym megaplasmid. The cloned fragment, which contains nodulation genes as well as the nitrogenase structural genes (nifHDK), has been shown to be colinear with the corresponding genomic region. Using transposon mutagenesis we have demonstrated that a region which is located more than 200 kb from the nifHDK operon on pSym is essential for symbiotic nitrogen fixation.Dedicated to Professor Georg Melchers to celebrate his 50-year association with the journal     

Atul Butte discusses the divide between bioinformatics and the clinic

Atul Butte is an Assistant in Endocrinology and Informatics and Attending Physician at Children's Hospital, Boston, USA (http://www.chip.org), and is an Instructor in Paediatrics at Harvard Medical School (http://www.harvard.edu). He received his undergraduate degree in Computer Science from Brown University in 1991, and worked in several stints as a software engineer at Apple Computer and Microsoft Corporation. He graduated from the Brown University School of Medicine in 1995, during which he worked as a research fellow at National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK; http://www.niddk.nih.gov) through the Howard Hughes/NIH Research Scholars Program. He completed his residency in Paediatrics and Fellowship in Paediatric Endocrinology in 2001, both at Children's Hospital. During his research under Isaac Kohane (at Children's Hospital) he developed a novel methodology for analyzing large data sets of RNA expression, called Relevance Networks. His recent awards include the 2003 Emory University School of Medicine, Pathology Residents’ Choice Award, 2002 American Association for Clinical Chemistry Outstanding Speaker Award, 2002 Endocrine Society Travel Award based on presentation merit, 2001 American Association for Cancer Research Scholar-In-Training Award and the 2001 Lawson Wilkins Paediatric Endocrine Society Clinical Scholar Award.     

Mercury detoxification and natural product synthesis: the work of Christopher T. Walsh

Mercuric Reductase. Purification and Characterization of a Transposon-encoded Flavoprotein Containing an Oxidation-Reduction-active Disulfide (Fox, B., and Walsh, C. T. (1982) J. Biol. Chem. 257, 2498–2503)Cloning, Overproduction, and Characterization of the Escherichia coli Holo-acyl Carrier Protein Synthase (Lambalot, R. H., and Walsh, C. T. (1995) J. Biol. Chem. 270, 24658–24661)Christopher Thomas Walsh was born in 1944 in Boston, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard University, where he did undergraduate research with E. O. Wilson, publishing a first author paper on the composition of fire ant trail substance in Nature (1). He earned his A.B. in biology in 1965. Walsh then went to Rockefeller University to work with Leonard B. Spector, publishing six first author papers and earning a Ph.D. in 1970 with a dissertation titled “The Mechanism of Action of the Citrate Cleavage Enzyme.”Open in a separate windowChristopher T. WalshWalsh did a 2-year postdoctoral fellowship with Robert H. Abeles at Brandeis University before joining the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1972 as an assistant professor. He eventually became the Karl Taylor Compton Professor and chairman of the chemistry department there.Walsh''s initial research at MIT centered on studies of a class of enzyme inhibitors called “suicide substrates,” compounds that were not toxic to cells but resembled normal metabolites so closely that they underwent metabolic transformation to form products that were inhibitory. Walsh also started to explore novel chemical transformations in biology, which led to his elucidation of the process by which bacteria detoxify mercury-containing molecules in the environment by cleaving carbon-mercury bonds and then reducing the mercuric salt to elemental mercury. An enzyme that is central to this process is a flavoprotein called mercuric reductase. The enzyme catalyzes two-electron reduction of mercuric ions to elemental mercury using NADPH as an electron donor. The elemental mercury is volatile and is thus nonenzymatically removed from the environment.In the first Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC) Classic reprinted here, Walsh and Barbara Fox describe the purification of mercuric reductase from Pseudomonas aeruginosa. To their surprise, they discovered that the enzyme had a high degree of similarity to lipoamide dehydrogenase and glutathione reductase, flavoenzymes that catalyze the transfer of electrons between pyridine nucleotides and disulfides. This paper initiated a series of studies investigating how the inorganic Hg²⁺ substrate is bound to two pairs of thiols, one in the active site and one as an exit site, and how electrons flow from NADPH through the FAD to the bound Hg²⁺.In 1987, Walsh moved to Harvard Medical School to learn more biology and medicine and to become chairman of the department of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology. He continued to study biocatalysts and began exploring antibiotic and antitumor agents as well. One of his first major findings at Harvard explained the mechanism by which resistance develops to the antibiotic vancomycin (2), work that provided the foundation to create new antibiotics.Walsh also is widely recognized for spurring a renaissance in natural product biosynthesis. This started with his investigation of holo-acyl carrier protein synthase (ACPS), a phosphopantetheinyltransferase (PPTase) that transfers the 4′-phosphopantetheine (4′-PP) moiety from coenzyme A to Ser-36 of acyl carrier protein (ACP) in E. coli. Walsh and Ralph H. Lambalot purified ACPS to near homogeneity by exploiting the fact that ACPS could be refolded and reconstituted after elution from an apo-ACP affinity column under denaturing conditions. As reported in the second JBC Classic reprinted here, Walsh and Lambalot used N-terminal sequencing of ACPS to determine that dpj, an essential gene of previously unknown function, was the structural gene for ACPS. These studies led to the identification of other PPTase genes and enzymes involved in the conversion of apo forms of acyl and peptidyl carrier proteins in polyketide and nonribosomal peptide synthases/synthetases. This, in turn, allowed posttranslational activation of these multimodular enzymes when heterologously expressed in E. coli, which started Walsh on a 10-year, 200-paper focus on the characterization of the many enzymatic steps in assembly line biosynthesis of natural products.Currently, Walsh is the Hamilton Kuhn Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at Harvard Medical School. He also was president of the Dana Farber Cancer Institute from 1992 to 1995. Walsh has received many honors and awards for his contributions to science. These include the Eli Lilly Award in Biochemistry (1979), the American Chemical Society (ACS) Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award in Organic Chemistry (1998), the ACS Repligen Award for Chemistry of Life Processes (1999), the ACS Alfred Bader Award for Bioorganic Chemistry (2003), the American Society for Microbiology Promega Biotechnology Research Award (2004), the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Fritz Lipmann Award (2005), the ACS Murray Goodman Award (2007), and the Stanford University School of Medicine Pauling Medal and Lecture (2010). Walsh also was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1988), the National Academy of Sciences (1989), and the American Philosophical Society (2003). He served on the JBC editorial board from 1978 to1980.¹     

Nobuhiko Katunuma: an outstanding scientist in the field of proteolysis and warm-hearted 'Kendo Fighter' biochemist

Professor Nobuhiko Katunuma is well known for his outstanding contribution to the understanding of proteolysis in general and cysteine proteinases and their inhibitors in mammals. In fact, he is a world pioneer in the field. In 1963, he started his highly successful scientific career as a Professor at the Institute for Enzyme Research, the University of Tokushima. During the initial 30 years of his career, he was interested in vitamin B6 metabolism and discovered the acceleration of turnover rates of pyridoxal enzyme in apoprotein formation. After this period, his interest expanded to lysosomal cystein proteinases and their endogenous inhibitors. After determining the crystal structure of human cathepsin B, he generated a series of chemically synthesized specific inhibitors of cathepsins. These inhibitors are currently used throughout the world and some of them have been applied therapeutically in various diseases. During his career and even at present, Professor Katunuma has been studying Biochemistry in Medicine and also practicing to become a 'Kendo sword fencing Fighter'.     

Average Waiting Time of Clusterhead Controlled Token for Virtual Base Station On-Demand in MANETs

A wireless mobile Ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile hosts forming nodes that are arbitrarily and randomly changing their locations and communicating without the aid of any centralized administration or standard support services. Ad hoc cluster-based routing protocols establish a dynamic wireless mobile infrastructure to mimic the operation of the fixed infrastructure in cellular networks. A clusterhead is elected from a set of nominees, based on an agreed upon rule, to act as a temporary base station within its zone or autonomous system. Mobile stations elected as clusterheads are used to track other mobile stations in the ad hoc network. In each cluster, we use the clusterhead controlled token to assign the channel among contending Mobile Terminals (MTs). A clusterhead controlled token supports multiple class of services and minimizes collisions. In this paper, we derive formulas to calculate the average waiting time for a packet, in order to get transmitted. In our study, we use two polling schemes, namely: Exhaustive polling and Partially Gated polling controlled token.Tarek Sheltami is currently an assistant professor at the Computer Engineering Department at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) Dhahran, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. He joined the department on September, 2004. Before joining the KFUPM, Dr. Sheltami was a research associate professor at the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE), University of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. He has two years of industrial experience at GamaEng Inc (2002–2004). He is the co-author of the Warning Energy Aware Clusterhead (WEAC) infrastructure protocol and the Virtual Base Station On-demand (VBS-O) routing protocol. Dr. Sheltami has been a member of a technical program and organizing committees of several international IEEE conferences. Dr. Sheltamis research interests are in the area of wireless communications, wireless ad hoc and sensors networks, mobile infrastructure protocols, network control/mobility management, UMTS, and performance evaluation of wireless communication networks.Hussein Mouftah joined the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) of the University of Ottawa in September 2002 as a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) Professor in Optical Networks. He has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Queens University (1979–2002), where he was prior to his departure a Full Professor and the Department Associate Head. He has three years of industrial experience mainly at Bell Northern Research of Ottawa, now Nortel Networks (1977–79). He has spent three sabbatical years also at Nortel Networks (1986–87, 1993–94, and 2000–01), always conducting research in the area of broadband packet switching networks, mobile wireless networks and quality of service over the optical Internet. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Communications Magazine (1995–97) and IEEE Communications Society Director of Magazines (1998–99) and Chair of the Awards Committee (2002–2003). He is a Distinguished Speaker of the IEEE Communications Society since 2000. Dr. Mouftah is the author or coauthor of five books, 22 book chapters and more than 700 technical papers and 8 patents in this area. He is the recipient of the 1989 Engineering Medal for Research and Development of the Association of Professional Engineers of Ontario (PEO), and the Ontario Distinguished Researcher Award of the Ontario Innovation Trust. He is the joint holder of the Best Paper Award for a paper presented at SPECTS 2002, and the Outstanding Paper Award for papers presented at the IEEE HPSR 2002 and the IEEE ISMVLõ1985. Also he is the joint holder of a Honorable Mention for the Frederick W. Ellersick Price Paper Award for Best Paper in the IEEE Communications Magazine in 1993. He is the recipient of the IEEE Canada (Region 7) Outstanding Service Award (1995). Also he is the recipient of the 2004 IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Achievement Award, and the 2004 George S. Glinski Award for Excellence in Research of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Ottawa. Dr. Mouftah is a Fellow of the IEEE (1990), the Canadian Academy of Engineering (2003) and the Engineering Institute of Canada (2005).     

The Roy L. Whistler International Award in Carbohydrate Chemistry 2008

The International Carbohydrate Organization is pleased to announcethat the Roy L. Whistler International Award in CarbohydrateChemistry for 2008 has been jointly awarded to Carolyn Bertozziof the University of California, Berkeley, CA,     

The discovery of statins

This year, the Lasker Foundation confers its Clinical Medical Research Award on Akira Endo for his isolation from fungi of statins, potent inhibitors of cholesterol synthesis in the liver. The introduction of statins to clinical practice has markedly reduced morbidity and mortality from atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.     

Herbert Tabor (1918–1920): obituary.

This invited Letter commemorates the life and scientific legacy of Dr. Herbert Tabor (1918–1920), a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda Maryland and former Chief Editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Dr. Herbert Tabor in his second floor laboratory of Building 8 taken in 2005 (photo credit Dr. Harry Saroff).Herbert Tabor was born in New York City on November 28th, 1918, at the start of the “Spanish Flu” pandemic. After attending public schools in the city, he matriculated in 1935 to Harvard College, where he studied biochemical science and he entered Harvard Medical School in 1937. In his final year, Herb worked in the Department of Biological Chemistry with A. Baird Hastings to determine the ionization constant of MgHPO4. This work was published in The Journal of Biological Chemistry, marking the beginning of his long involvement with the journal.After graduation in 1942, Herb held an internship at Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he engaged in some laboratory work in clinical chemistry. While there, Herb performed the first therapeutic injection of penicillin in the USA, rapidly curing the patient of severe septicemia. The country being at war, in January 1943, he was commissioned in the US Public Health Service and served as medical officer on a US Coast Guard cutter, which was providing escort service to North Atlantic convoys. The following September, he was transferred to The National Institutes of Health, which had just moved to a new site in Bethesda Maryland, then a small town outside of Washington D.C. Herb was assigned to work with Sanford Rosenthal, who was interested in the electrolyte imbalance response to trauma and burn injuries and how these might be treated by administration of saline solution. In 1946, Herb married Celia White, who he had met in Boston, some years earlier. That same year, he helped form a lunch time seminar group to discuss the biochemical literature. Founding members included other biochemist luminaries such as Leon Heppel, Bernie Horecker and Arthur Kornberg.Meetings were held every day and the seminar lasted for many years through many changes in participants. In the early 1960’s, during a casual conversation at the seminar, Herb was surprised to discover the origin of the penicillin which he had administered in 1942. It had been prepared by an NIH colleague, Gil Ashwell, who had worked at Merck at the time. The drug was considered so precious, that Gil also had the job of its recovery from the patient’s urine. Herb and Celia moved into commissioned officer housing, conveniently located on the NIH campus in 1949. This was just 10 min from the laboratory. This is where they raised their family and stayed for over 70 years. Celia left George Washington University in 1952 and joined Herb at NIH. They began their work together on the biosynthesis, function and genetics of polyamines in normal and cancerous cells. This would occupy the rest of their careers. Sanford Rosenthal retired in 1961 and Herb took over as chief of the Laboratory of Biochemical Pharmacology, NIAMD (as it then was). He held this position until 1999.It is impossible to write about Herb Tabor without remembering his long association with The Journal of Biological Chemistry. He served on the editorial board from 1961 to 1966 and was appointed as an executive editor in 1968. Following the resignation of William Stein, he was promoted to editor in chief in 1971. Herb was devoted to all aspects of publishing the journal, though he did say that he was pleased that restrictions on his primary role as a civil servant got him out of many telephone calls from disgruntled authors. During his tenure, the annual output of published papers increased more than fourfold, with accompanying increases in the size of the editorial board. He was the moving force behind changing the journal to an electronic format. Initially this involved parallel publication of papers on CD-ROM in 1992. Finally, in 1995 the journal was moved onto the internet. J. Biol. Chem. was one of the first biological journals to make this move. Herb stood down as executive editor in 2010, assuming the title of co-editor.During his career, Herb received many prestigious awards. Notably, in 1971, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1977, to the National Academy of Sciences and in 1986, the Hillebrand Award from the American Chemical Society. Montgomery County, MD recognized his scientific achievements, by naming November 28th 2018, his hundredth birthday, as Dr. Herbert Tabor Day. Celia retired from NIH in 2005 and died in 2012. Herb never talked about retirement. Publishing his last scientific paper in 2019 (Keller et al. 2019) he passed away in his sleep on August 20th 2020, at his home on the NIH campus. He is survived by his four children, Edward, Marilyn, Richard and Stanley, together with 10 grandchildren and 6 great-grandchildren.     

Genetic basis for opine secretion from crown gall tumour cells

Summary Plant cells neoplastically transformed by insertion of T-DNA from Ti plasmids of agrobacteria produce and secrete opines. Secretion of two of these opines (octopine and nopaline) is shown to require the expression of a single gene, which we designate ons.Dedicated to Professor Georg Melchers to celebrate his 50-year association with the journal