Photo credit: NIH — File:Sidney Altman.jpg (Wikimedia Commons) · Public domain
Sidney Altman
1939–2022 · Canada, United States · 20th century
Nobel Chemistry 1989
Canadian-American molecular biologist who showed that RNA can be catalytic, sharing the prize for the discovery of ribozymes.
Nobel Prize work
Studying the enzyme RNase P, Altman proved that its RNA subunit alone can catalyse the cleavage of precursor tRNA — the first demonstration that RNA, not only protein, can act as an enzyme. The discovery of ribozymes overturned a dogma and made plausible an RNA world at the origin of life.
Fields
Related topics
Enzymes and enzyme kinetics
Enzymes accelerate reactions by lowering the activation free-energy barrier; they do not change the equilibrium constant.
DNA and RNA structure
DNA stores information in a paired double helix; RNA shares the nucleotide backbone but often forms diverse single-stranded folds.