- Person
- Roger Kornberg
- Lived
- b. 1947
- Field
- Structural biology
- From
- American
The story
For a cell to use any gene, it must first copy the gene’s DNA into messenger RNA, a process called transcription. In humans and other complex organisms the copying is done by RNA polymerase II, a machine made of a dozen proteins. Transcription is so essential that the toxin of the death cap mushroom, which jams this enzyme, kills within days.
Roger Kornberg, a Stanford structural biologist from a Jewish family of scientists, spent about two decades working out how this machine operates. His laboratory first had to build a working transcription system from yeast, something many laboratories had failed to do; it showed that the yeast machinery is essentially the same as ours. In 1990 the group found evidence of a missing go-between that relays signals from the proteins that switch genes on to the polymerase. They called it Mediator, and when they purified it in 1994 it proved to be an assembly of about two dozen proteins. Mediator is now known to be central to gene control in all complex organisms.
Meanwhile Kornberg pursued an atomic picture of RNA polymerase II, a molecule far larger than any solved by X-ray crystallography when he began. His team invented new ways to crystallise proteins and, in 2001, published the structure at near-atomic detail, followed by images of the enzyme caught in the act of copying DNA into RNA. For the first time scientists could see the DNA entering the machine and the new RNA strand growing.
The Nobel committee, awarding him the 2006 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, noted that disturbances in transcription are involved in many illnesses, including cancer, heart disease and inflammation, and that understanding it is important for therapies based on stem cells. Kornberg’s structures are now the reference maps used by researchers working out how genes go wrong in disease and how drugs might correct them.
Why it matters
Kornberg’s pictures of the gene-reading machine guide research into cancer, inflammation, developmental disorders and stem-cell therapies, all of which depend on how genes are switched on and off.
About Roger Kornberg
Stanford biologist who discovered how DNA is packaged in our cells and made the first atom-by-atom pictures of genes being read, knowledge used in cancer and stem-cell research. Nobel Prize 2006.
More about Roger Kornberg
Sources
- Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2006 NobelPrize.org
- Roger D. Kornberg, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Roger D. Kornberg Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.