Stanford biochemist to give Neurath Lecture on molecular motors

Dr. James Spudich

Dr. James Spudich, professor and chair of the Department of Biochemistry at Stanford University, will present the 15th annual Hans Neurath Lecture for the UW Department of Biochemistry.

Spudich, who has extensively studied how proteins create movement in cells and tissues, will speak on "Myosin: From Single Molecule Mechanics to its Role in Cytokinesis" at 3:30 p.m., Wednesday, April 8, in room T-625 of the Health Sciences Center.

He will also give a Biochemistry Seminar at 3:30 p.m., Thursday, April 9, in room T-747 of the Health Sciences Center. His topic then will be "What Can We Learn From Single Molecule Analysis That We Cannot From Averaging Properties of Ensembles of Molecules."

Myosin is a protein common to all muscle tissues, and Spudich is best known for his contributions to understanding myosin-based "molecular motors," the molecules that produce motion in living tissues.

Spudich, who earned his Ph.D. in 1968 at Stanford, working with Nobel Laureate Arthur Kornberg, began his studies of muscle contraction and cell movement in the early 1970s. He has been a faculty member at Stanford since 1977.

In recent years, he has been working with systems to study molecular motors outside living tissue. Using methods such as the "laser tweezer" approach, he and his colleagues have been able to study the events in muscle contraction in terms of the movements of single molecules and the forces affecting them. They are also interested in the role myosin plays in cytokinesis—the changes in cell shape occurring during morphogenesis as cell types differentiate.

His lab has also worked with the techniques of genetic engineering to understand how specific alterations to genes that produce myosin and other proteins affect the function of tissues. To study effects in living cells, they developed a method of targeted gene replacement in a species of slime mold, which has many cell functions similar to mammalian cells and is easy to put under powerful microscopes.

Spudich has received many awards, including the American Heart Association Basic Research Prize, the Alexander von Humboldt Research Award, the Biophysical Society Lifetime Research Career Award and the 1997 Repligen Corp. Award in Chemistry of Biological Processes. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Hans Neurath, for whom the lecture is named, is now professor emeritus of biochemistry. He came to the UW as the founding chair of biochemistry in 1950. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1961, the same year he founded the journal Biochemistry. From 1990 through 1997 he was editor-in-chief of Protein Science, a publication of the Protein Society.

Neurath has received numerous international honors for his work in enzyme action and protein structure. His research has been supported for half a century by the National Institutes of Health, and he was elected a senior member of the Institute of Medicine in 1994. ¶

Claire Dietz