Adenosine triphosphate discovery

Paul D. Boyer (b. 1918 in Provo, Utah) is Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). He shared half of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1997 with John Walker (b. 1941), MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge, England, for their elucidation of the enzymatic mechanism underlying the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP). [The other half of the 1997 chemistry Nobel Prize went to Professor Jens C. Skou (b. 1918) of Aarhus University, Denmark, for the first discovery of an ion-transporting enzyme, Na , IC-ATPase. ]... 

An important discovery, that of free adenylic acid in muscle, was made by Embden in 1927. Muscle adenylate was recognized as the 5 -mono-phosphoric ester of adenosine because enzymatic deamination yielded the known inosinic acid. It was shown at that time that the deaminase preparations from muscle did not deaminate the adenylic acid isolated from alkaline hydrolysates of yeast nucleic acid as well, differences were apparent in the chemical properties of the adenylic acids from these two sources. Yeast adenylic acid and the other nucleotides from alkaline hydrolysates of RNA were ultimately shown to be mixtures of the 2 - and 3 -phospho esters. In 1929 the isolation of adenosine triphosphate from muscle was reported by Lohmann and independently by Fiske and Subbarow. The discovery of adenosine diphosphate followed in 1935. 

Severe Ochoa began his career as a biochemist not long after the discovery of the importance of the pyrophosphate bond in energy transduction. Lohmann, working in the laboratory of Severn s teacher Otto Meyerhof, discovered in 1929 what we now know as the central compound of bioenergetics—adenosine triphosphate. ... 

Determination of molecular weights of many proteins with the ultracentrifuge (Svedberg) 1929 Discovery of labile phosphate Adenosine triphosphate (Lohmann Fiske and... 

A major function of mitochondria—to provide cells with adenosine 5 -triphosphate (ATP) produced by oxidative phosphorylation—requires that ATP, adenosine 5 -diphosphate (ADP), inorganic phosphate (Pi), and metabolic substrates cross the outer membrane. The discovery (8) that VDAC channels are voltage-gated raises possibilities for regulation with far-reaching consequences. If the outer membrane were to become impermeable to critical metabolites, important functions such as mitochondrial ATP production would cease. 

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