G. N. Ramachandran

GN Ramachandran ( Gopalasamudram Narayana Iyer Ramachandran, born October 8, 1922 in Ernakulam, Kerala, † April 7, 2001 in Chennai, Tamil Nadu ) was an Indian biophysicist. He made ​​a decisive contribution to the understanding of protein structures by the eponymous Ramachandran plot and provided many more articles in biology and physics.

Life

Ramachandran was born in the town of Ernakulam in Kerala (India). He enrolled at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore in electrical engineering, but moved to the Department of Physics little later. There he received his doctorate under the Nobel laureate CV Raman, where he mainly focused on X-ray crystallography.

Ramachandran spent two years (1947-1949) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge and then came back as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Science back. In 1952 he moved to the University of Madras, where he continued his work in X-ray crystallography as a full professor and his interest was drawn to the structure of biological macromolecules. He suggested in 1954 along with Gopinath Kartha the triple helix structure of collagen, which he had elucidated using X-ray crystallography.

In 1962 he published his general reflections on the conformation of proteins, which are today known as the Ramachandran plot, and since then represent a tool for structure determination of proteins.

In 1970 he founded the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science, which later became known as the ' Centre of Advanced Study in Crystallography and Biophysics.

Ramachandran received the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar et al Award for Physics in India and was a member of the Royal Society in London. In 1999 he received the Ewald Prize of the International Union of Crystallography for his " extraordinary contributions to the crystallography ".