Americans share Nobel chemistry prize
Americans Peter Agre and Roderick MacKinnon today shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
They received the €1m award for their discoveries concerning “channels in cell membranes", the Royal Swedish Academy said.
Agre, 54, is on the staff of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, and MacKinnon, 47, is at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute of The Rockefeller University in New York.
Agre was cited for his work in 1988 for isolating a membrane protein that, a year or so later, he realised must be the long-sought-after water channel.
The discovery opened the door to a whole series of biochemical, physiological and genetic studies of water channels in bacteria, plants and mammals.
Today, researchers can follow in detail a water molecule on its way through the cell membrane and understand why only water, not other small molecules or ions, can pass, the academy said.
MacKinnon was honoured for his work for studying the other type of membrane channel, or ion channel.
He surprised the whole research community when in 1998 he was able to determine the spatial structure of a potassium channel. Thanks to this contribution we can now “see” ions flowing through channels that can be opened and closed by different cellular signals.
