Chemistry Labs

Photo credit: Sharon Gabay — Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

Aaron Ciechanover

born 1947 · Israel · Contemporary

Nobel Chemistry 2004

Technion physician-biochemist who, with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, unravelled how cells tag and destroy proteins via ubiquitin; shared the 2004 Nobel Prize.

Nobel Prize work

Shared with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose for discovering ubiquitin-mediated protein degradation: their work showed that cells tag proteins destined for destruction with the small protein ubiquitin and digest them in the proteasome — the quality-control system of the cell, now a target for cancer drugs such as bortezomib.

Fields

Biochemistry and biomedical chemistry

Related topics

Protein structure and function

A protein is a sequence that folds into a shape; its surface and flexibility help determine what it can bind or catalyse.

Metabolism (glycolysis, Krebs cycle, electron transport chain)

Metabolism is a network of linked reactions that captures energy and supplies building blocks; ATP and reduced cofactors connect pathways.

PROTACs, targeted protein degradation

PROTACs are heterobifunctional molecules that redirect cellular protein-quality-control machinery to degrade a selected target.

Chemists in the same field

Martin Chalfie (1947)Michael Levitt (1947)Roger Kornberg (1947)Thomas Cech (1947)Aziz Sancar (1946)Paul Modrich (1946)