The rockefeller university

Event Details

Type

Friday Lecture Series

Speaker(s)

Marc W. Kirschner, Ph.D., John Franklin Enders University Professor; chair, department of systems biology, Harvard Medical School

Speaker bio(s)

One of the characteristic features of life is specificity. It emerges in metabolism, information transfer from DNA to protein, embryology, immunology and virtually every other process. Its explanation on the molecular level is thermodynamic stability and structural complementarity. Yet one disturbing question persists: the protein and nucleic acid sequences coding for that specificity are generally too small to distinguish actual partners from competitors. Similarly, protein degradation conveys specificity through very short sequences. The process is so kinetically complex that bulk kinetic experiments and a few molecular structures are insufficient to explain how specificity is achieved. Using single molecule kinetic measurements, Dr. Kirschner's lab has deconvolved much of that specificity. The results reveal a novel process based loosely on some original ideas of kinetic proofreading by John Hopfield and Jacques Ninio. The unraveling of the details of the ubiquitin mechanism has led Dr. Kirschner to think more generally about the tradeoffs in biology between specificity and speed and the limits to which energy consumption can optimize that tradeoff. These conclusions, based on understanding the mechanism of protein degradation, may be relevant to other biochemical processes such as phosphorylation and transcription. 

 

Dr. Kirschner graduated from Northwestern University in 1966 and received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1971. Following postdoctoral research at Berkeley and at the University of Oxford, he was appointed assistant professor at Princeton University in 1972 and professor in 1978. In 1978, he moved to the department of biochemistry and biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco; in 1993 he moved to Harvard Medical School to become the founding chair of the department of cell biology. In 2003, he established the department of systems biology at Harvard Medical School and became its first chair. In 2009 he was named University Professor, Harvard’s highest professorial distinction. 

 

Dr. Kirschner is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and the Academia Europaea. He has received numerous honors and awards.

Open to

Public

Reception

Refreshments, 3:15 p.m. - 3:45 p.m., Abby Lounge

Contact

Linda Hanssler

Phone

(212) 327-7714

Sponsor

Linda Hanssler
(212) 327-7714
lhanssler@rockefeller.edu

Readings

http://librarynews.rockefeller.edu/?p=3834