Nobel laureate speaks at UNC-CH distinguished lecture series March 17

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1989 for his studies of RNA, will speak at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Tuesday (March 17).

His free and public lecture, part of the UNC-CH School of Medicine’s department of pharmacology Distinguished Lecture Series, is at 4 p.m. in room 00-002 at the UNC Lineberger Cancer Center.

Altman, who holds the Sterling professorship in biology at Yale, also earned the Rosenstiel Award for Basic Biomedical Research in 1989, the National Institutes of Health Merit Award in 1989 and the Yale Science and Engineering Association Award in 1990.

After graduating from the University of Colorado, Altman won a fellowship in the British laboratory of Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, the molecule that encodes genetic information that tells cells how to function and grow.

Altman specializes in the chemical processes involved in copying information from DNA (deoxy-ribonucleic acid) by RNA (ribonucleic acid) and using it to make proteins, the building blocks of cells.

In Crick’s lab, Altman discovered an enzyme called "Rnase P" that chopped off an intermediate molecule of RNA called "precursor-tRNA". Enzymes are special protein molecules that make chemical reactions go faster -- a process called catalysis. They do this by holding or bending a target molecule so that one of its chemical bonds breaks more easily.

It took about a decade, but Altman eventually discovered that the enzyme he was after was not your average enzyme. Instead of being a protein like all other enzymes, it was made of two parts -- one strand of RNA and one protein. Furthermore, it was the RNA portion that provided the catalysis.

This was a significant discovery because RNA molecules are much more primitive than protein molecules. Besides offering an explanation for how life might have begun billions of years ago, it also hints at how to beat a troublesome primitive life form: the common cold. It may be possible to design catalytic RNA-based vaccines that kill cold viruses by chopping up the RNA on which they are based.

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