Bruce Merrifield, one of the fathers of modern peptide synthesis and recipient of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died of a long illness last week (May 14) at his home in Cresskill, N.J., according to Rockefeller University.Merrifield was best known as the creator of solid phase peptide synthesis, a process that enabled the systematic study of the structure of proteins. In 1963, he published an influential paper describing the binding of a peptide to an insoluble support so that reagents can be washed away at the end of each synthesis step. More than 20 years later, the idea earned him a Nobel Prize."Merrifield's method made peptides accessible to the non-specialist, and had vast ramifications in many areas of modern biochemistry," said George Barany, a former graduate student of Merrifield's, now at the University of Minnesota.But in the 1960s, there was not unanimous support for Merrifield's idea. At...
Richard DiMarchiThe ScientistpentapeptideJames TamThe ScientistGarland MarshallLenore Martindsecko@the-scientist.comhttp://nobelprize.org/chemistry/laureates/1984/index.htmlJournal of Peptide SciencePM_ID: 14552416Journal of the American Chemical Societyhttp://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/jacsat/1963/85/i14/f-pdf/f_ja00897a025.pdfhttp://www.chem.umn.edu/groups/baranygp/georgebio.htmhttp://www.indiana.edu/~rdmweb/Protein SciencePM_ID: 8880923http://www.scripps.edu/research/faculty.php?rec_id=12066http://www.cmd.wustl.edu/Marshall_Page.htmhttp://www.uri.edu/personal/lma8738u/INDEX.HTML
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