Sidney Altman

Sidney " Sid " Altman ( born May 7, 1939 in Montreal, Canada ) is a Canadian physicist and biochemist. He got together with Thomas R. Cech 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA.

Life

Sid Altman grew up as a child of an immigrant family, and studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, later Biophysics at the University of Colorado, where he received his doctorate in 1967. Later he became a professor at Yale University, where he teaches today.

His pioneering research on RNA began in Cambridge, UK on Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology by Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner.

In the study of the complex process sequence in which the participation of six RNA molecules, the encoded information of the DNA for the production of the corresponding proteins leads Altman discovered an enzyme RNase P, which cleaves the end portions of one of the intermediate RNA molecules. After ten years of research, Altman was able to demonstrate that the investigated enzyme, as usual, was not a protein, but a combination of an RNA adapter and a protein. In this case, the RNA piece was essential for the specific catalytic activity.

This is therefore significant because the piece of RNA is substantially simpler than conventional enzymes. Thus, an approximate path was visible as archetypes of life itself could have formed from relatively simple molecules.

The examined by him mechanisms could also prove valuable to combat cold viruses. These also consist primarily of RNA.