Peter Walter

Peter Walter ( born December 5, 1954 in Berlin ) is a German - American biochemist and molecular biologist. He is since 1983 professor at the University of California, San Francisco and beyond since 1997 Member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. For his research on the folding and transport of proteins to regulate the formation of cell organelles as well as the fusion of cell membranes, he was admitted among other things, the National Academy of Sciences and the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2009 he received the prestigious Canada Gairdner International Award.

Life

Peter Walter was born in what was then West Berlin in 1954 and started in 1973 to study chemistry at the Free University of Berlin. After the bachelor's degree, he moved in 1976 with a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service in the United States at the Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he graduated a year later with a Master of Science in Organic Chemistry. Subsequently, he received his doctorate from 1977 to 1981 at the Rockefeller University in New York in the laboratory Nobel Prize winner Günter Blobel.

After completing his doctoral work, he remained first as a postdoctoral fellow in the Blobel lab before he assistant professor at Rockefeller University in 1982. A year later he moved to the University of California ( UCB) in San Francisco, where he became Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics, and later the head of the department of biochemistry and biophysics. Since 1997 he also holds positions at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Peter Walter is married to a chemist from Mexico and father of two daughters. He has his wife accepted as an American citizen.

Scientific work

Peter Walter discovered the signal recognition particle, a ribonucleoprotein complex that is involved in protein transport into the endoplasmic reticulum of eukaryotes and in the plasma membrane of prokaryotes as part of its promotion. Focus of the work in his laboratory at the UCB has been studying the mechanisms of protein folding, transport of proteins to their destinations within cells, the regulation of size and number of organelles in the cells and the fusion of cell membranes.

Since the 1990s he has made ​​fundamental contributions to the discovery and elucidation of the Unfolded Protein Response ( UPR), a cytoprotective signaling pathway that acts as a cellular stress response to protect against errors in protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum. He is also considered a co-discoverer of the enzyme IRE1, a serine -threonine kinase and endoribonuclease with central importance in the context of the UPR, and explores, among other things, such as IRE1 misfolded proteins recognize.

Peter Walter acts as a co-author, edited by Bruce Alberts textbook Molecular Biology of the Cell, which is one of the most widely used standard works in the field of molecular cell biology world. He is also a member of the editorial boards of the journals PLoS Biology, Journal of Biology and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a supporter of the Open Access approach to the publication of research results.

Awards

Peter Walter was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2004 to the National Academy of Sciences in 2002. Since 2004 he is also at the European Molecular Biology Organization, since 2006 he is member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. In 2009 he was awarded for his research on protein folding Canadian with $ 100,000 in doped Canada Gairdner International Award and the EB Wilson Medal, the highest scientific award of the American Society for Cell Biology.

In addition, he was among others, the Eli Lilly Award in Biological Chemistry, which is awarded by the American Chemical Society for outstanding research in biochemistry before 38 years of age, and the Passano Award, the Searle Scholar Award, a Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, the Stein & Moore Award and the Otto Warburg Medal Award. In December 2011 it the Paul Ehrlich and Ludwig Darmstaedter Prize for 2012 was awarded. In 2012 he also received the Ernst Jung Prize for Medicine.

Works (selection)

• Molecular Biology of the Cell. 5th edition. New York 2008; German edition: Molecular biology of the cell. 4th edition. Weinheim 2004 ( co-author )
• Essential Cell Biology. 3rd edition. New York 2009 ( co-author )