David Eisenberg

David S. Eisenberg ( born March 15, 1939 in Chicago) is an American biochemist.

Eisenberg studied at Harvard University (Bachelor 1961), where he studied with John T. Edsall and wanted to become a doctor originally, and in 1964 received his doctorate at Coulson at the University of Oxford ( in theoretical chemistry). As a post - graduate student, he was from 1964 to 1966 at Princeton University with Walter Kauzmann and 1966-1969 Richard E. Dickerson at Caltech. Since 1969 he has been Professor of Biochemistry at the University of California, Los Angeles ( UCLA), at the time Paul D. Boyer Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. From 1993 he was the Director of The UCLA - DOE Institute for Genomics and Proteomics. He is also a member of the California NanoSystems Institute ( CNSI ) and since 2000 at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Eisenberg studied pathogenic protein interactions in neurodegenerative disorders, such as amyloid fibrils in Alzheimer 's disease and prion about in Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease. Characteristic are misfolded proteins that form the fibrils and in the case of prions can be infectious for these diseases. They could, for example, locate the misfolded prion Sup35 shares of wheat, crystallize and clarify with new methods of X-ray crystallography the three-dimensional structure, which showed a close interaction as in a zipper and explained the stability of the complexes.

Based on the gained in the laboratory - protein interaction data, which are collected in the Database of Interacting Protein ( DIP), examined his laboratory also networks of interacting proteins.

In addition, his laboratory investigates the time (2010 ) the structure of the tubercle bacillus.

In 1992 he succeeded to his laboratory in collaboration with the laboratory of R. John Collier, the elucidation of the three-dimensional structure of the diphtheria toxin.

1969 and 1971 he was Sloan Fellow and Guggenheim Fellow in 1985. In 2008 he received the Harvey Prize. He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1989 and he is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2004 he received the Seaborg Medal UCLA.

He has been married since 1963 and has two children.