Har Gobind Khorana
Har Gobind Khorana (* probably January 9, 1922 in Raipur, Punjab ( now in Pakistan's part); † November 9, 2011 in Concord, Massachusetts ) was an Indian- American molecular biologist and Nobel Prize winners.
Khorana succeeded in 1970 as the first artificial synthesis of a gene. He provided substantial work for deciphering the genetic code. Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Heinrich Matthaei had laid by the basic poly -U experiment this the starting point.
Life
Khorana was born in what was then British India. His birthplace is located in, now part of Pakistan part of Punjab. His exact date of birth is not known in the documents January 9, 1922 was later added. He came from a Hindu family, who fled after the partition of British India from the newly established Muslim state of Pakistan. Although the family was very poor, his father took great on the education of his children, so that his family was virtually the only place on the all could read and write. After schooling Khorana studied at the University of the Punjab in Lahore and graduated with a Master's degree (M.Sc. ) from. In 1945 he went on a scholarship to England to begin a PhD at the University of Liverpool. After acquiring the title of Doctor ( Ph.D.), he worked until 1949, two years at the Federal Institute of Technology Zurich with Vladimir Prelog and then two years at Cambridge, where he focused primarily on the research of nucleic acids and proteins. In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where he continued his research on nucleic acids. In 1960 he moved to the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He became a U.S. citizen in 1966 and was a professor of biology and chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 1970.
Khorana was married in 1952 to Esther Elizabeth Sibler († 2001). The couple has two daughters and a son.
Scientific performance
The most significant achievement of Khoranas and employees located in deciphering the genetic code. After Nirenberg and Matthaei had proved in their poly -U experiment that the base sequence UCU codes for the amino acid serine and CUC for leucine, synthesized Khorana and his team in a systematic sequence of many different messenger RNAs and could thus determine which base sequence for which amino acid encoded. For example,
UACUACUACUACUACUAC UAC UAC UAC → ..., or ACU ACU ACU, or CUA CUA CUA, which corresponds to the amino acid tyrosine, threonine and leucine.
Khoranas working group also found that UAG, UAA, and UGA do not code for amino acids, but so-called " stop codons " are.
Many techniques are still used today in the oligonucleotide synthesis were in the group of Khorana late 1950s and developed in the early 1960s ( such as the use of protecting groups ).
Honors
For his work Khorana received in 1968 along with Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In the same year he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize -, he also became a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 1969 he was awarded the second highest Indian National Award, Padma Vibhushan the awarded. In 1980, Khorana a Gairdner Foundation International Award, the 1987 National Medal of Science.