Brian Kobilka

Brian Kent Kobilka (* May 30, 1955 in Little Falls, Minnesota) is an American biochemist. The professor at Stanford University School of Medicine was awarded on October 10, 2012, together with Robert Lefkowitz of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for their studies of G- protein -coupled receptors ".

Life and scientific work

Brian K. Kobilkas father and his grandfather were bakers by profession. Kobilka studied biology and chemistry at the University of Minnesota Duluth and completed after his bachelor the School of Medicine of Yale University. After an internal medicine training at Barnes Hospital of Washington University in St. Louis, he conducted research as a postdoctoral fellow with Robert Lefkowitz at Duke University. His special attention was paid since the β2 - adrenergic receptor, a protein from the group of G- protein -coupled receptors, which is involved in the action of the hormone adrenaline. During his time at Duke University and his colleagues succeeded in the initial cloning of a ligand-gated G protein- coupled receptor. This was not only a milestone in the study of pharmacologically important protein group, but also opened up new opportunities for drug discovery. In 1994 he received the John J. Abel Award in Pharmacology. In 2007 and in subsequent years, Brian Kobilka published a series of papers on the spatial structure and the three-dimensional operation of G- protein -coupled receptors, a class of proteins that are almost inaccessible to the structural analysis was considered until then. In 2010 he received the Julius Axelrod Award - ASPET. 2011 took him to the National Academy of Sciences. 2012 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to him.

His wife, Tong Sun Thian, he learned at the University of Minnesota know. They have two children.

Publications (selection )

• Brian K. Kobilka et al.: An intronless gene encoding a potential member of the family of receptors coupled to guanine nucleotide regulatory proteins. In: Nature, Vol 329, No. 6134, 1987, pp. 75-79, doi: 10.1038/329075a0.
• Daniel K. Rohrer, Brian K. Kobilka: G protein - coupled receptors: functional and mechanistic insights through altered gene expression. In: Physiological Reviews, Volume 78, No. 1, 1998, pp. 35-52, PMID 9,457,168th
• Brian K. Kobilka: G protein coupled receptor structure and activation. In: Biochimica et Biophysica Acta, Volume 1768, No. 4, 2007, pp. 794-807, doi: 10.1016/j.bbamem.2006.10.021.
• January Steyaert, Brian K. Kobilka: nanobody stabilization of G protein - coupled receptor conformational states. In: Current Opinion in Structural Biology, Volume 21, No. 4, 2011, pp. 567-572, doi: 10.1016/j.sbi.2011.06.011.