Paul Boyer

Boyer, Paul (Boyer, Paul) (p. 1918). Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1997 (jointly with D. Walker and J. Skou).

Born in 1918 and to 21 years lived in the town of Provo (Utah, USA), founded by Mormons for 70 years before his birth. His father, a doctor, osteopath Dell Delos Boyer - one of the descendants of Pioneer with Mayflower. Mother, Grace Gaymon died in 1933, when the youngest of five children was 8 years old. 15 years after that, his father remarried.

The first acquaintance with chemistry occurred when Boyer presented a set of chemical. He began his studies at Parker School, and graduated Farrerovskuyu high school, and was younger classmates and graduated from high school in 16 years.

He continued his education at a local college - Brigheymskom Youth University. Of course the chemical analysis of an idea about the necessity and the beauty of accurate measurements, and his particular interest in organic chemistry. Summer Boyer, like many peers, was moonlighting as a waiter or employee of the hotel.

With a dedicated his scholarship was in graduate school at the Department of Biochemistry, University of Wisconsin-Madison and the spring of 1943 he defended his thesis on the activation of the enzyme pyruvate.

As the war went on, Boyer was included in the military project, carried out at Stanford University and concerned the albumin of blood plasma. His main goal was to find a way to stabilize the solutions. The proposed method of stabilization of the addition of butyrate was adopted and used so far. Studies at Stanford, gave the experience of working with proteins Boyer.

At the end of the war took the offer to become assistant at the University of Minnesota, however, he was sent to serve in the navy and only a year later he came to Minnesota. Teachers' salaries are not enough to support a family, which at that time consisted of three children and the Boyer worked in his spare time suppliers, plumber, electrician, carpenter, etc..

Guggenheim Fellowship gave Boyer the opportunity to spend a year in Sweden. There, he conducted research at Stockholm University, together with Olav Lindberg (Olov Lindberg) and at the Nobel Medical Institute at the Axel Hugo Theodor Hugo Theorell (Nobel laureate in physiology medicine, 1955).

Sam Boyer in 1955 received the prize in chemistry enzymes of the American Chemical Society. In 1956 he was granted a professor's scholarship fund Hill, and he went to the branch of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where he continued to study enzymes. Above all, it concerned by the question of ATP synthesis, on which he focused.

The summer of 1963 joined the University of California at Los Angeles, a new laboratory in the foothills of Santa Monica. He and his colleagues found that the enzyme associated with fosfogistidin, which they discovered, is an intermediate step in the cycle of phosphorylation of citric acid. This was a step towards the future of open.

In 1965, Boyer accepted an offer to become director of the newly established Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of. The primary purpose of the institute was basic research functioning of living cells at the molecular level.

Boyer and Englishman John Walker showed how the enzyme ATP synthase carries out the synthesis of ATP. This controls the synthesis of the pH gradient across the membrane.

In 1964, Boyer hypothesized that the synthesis of ATP occurs as a result of structural changes in the molecule of ATP synthase. In the subsequent decade has been found yet another law - the consistency and coherence of the three catalytic sites of the enzyme. It was called rotational catalysis. Been successfully investigated and other aspects of the mechanism of action of ATP synthase. In 1973, using chemical methods, he also suggested that the mechanism of these structural changes - the mechanism connecting the exchange.

ATP synthase consists of related membrane disk part (subunits a, b and c) and part of the serving of the membrane (with a-, b-and g-subunits). With the passage of hydrogen ions in a subunit of the disk of the membrane, part of the disk comes into rotation. g-subunits of the protruding part of the enzyme associated with the Fixed disk part and therefore rotates with it. The upper part of the protruding part of ATP synthase is similar to a cylinder with alternating a-and b-subunits (each with three). g-subunits asymmetric shape in the center of the cylinder causes changes in the structure of b-subunits during its rotation at a speed of 100 revolutions per second. Since the g-subunit functions as an asymmetric shaft, each of the three b-subunits have to undergo structural changes when it provorote. For one of them joined ADP and phosphate ions in the other - the synthesis of one ATP in the third - the release of ATP. As a result of one cycle of all three forms are swapped, and is synthesized ATP molecules. ATP synthase is ready for a new cycle

. Boyer works for oxidative phosphorylation continued, and in 1971 it was found that the energy in this process is not used directly for ATP formation, and the costs to facilitate the separation of already formed ATP from the enzyme
.

Boyer works were carried out with broad international cooperation both in the laboratory and in the course of numerous trips abroad. Boyer to the workers aims visited Australia, South Africa, Japan, Sweden, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Wales, Argentina, Iran and other countries.

In 1997 he was awarded the Nobel Prize, together with J. Skou and D. Walker 'for the establishment of the enzymatic mechanism that controls the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP)'. Boyer said: "I firmly believe that our present and future knowledge of ourselves and everything that surrounds us depends on the tools and methods of science '.