Photo credit: Camille Ruf — ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, via Wikimedia Commons · Public domain
Richard Willstätter
1872–1942 · Germany · Born in the 1800s
Nobel Chemistry 1915
German organic chemist who studied alkaloids and plant pigments; his analysis of chlorophyll and pioneering use of chromatography earned the 1915 Nobel Prize, and he was a founder of enzyme chemistry.
Nobel Prize work
Awarded for research on plant pigments, especially chlorophyll: he determined its structure, showed that it contains magnesium bound in a porphyrin-like core related to blood heme, and developed adsorption chromatography to separate the pigments of leaves.
Fields
Related topics
Alkaloids, terpenoids, flavonoids
Three large families of natural products arise from different biosynthetic building blocks and show wide structural variety and biological activity.
Gas chromatography (GC), high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC)
Chromatography separates components because they partition differently between mobile and stationary phases.