James Spudich
| James Spudich | |
|---|---|
| Born | Benld, Illinois |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields | Biochemistry, Biophysics |
| Institutions | Stanford University |
| Alma mater | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology |
| Doctoral advisor | Arthur Kornberg |
| Other academic advisors | John Woodland Hastings, Hugh Huxley |
| Known for | Molecular motors |
| Notable awards |
E. B. Wilson Medal (2011) Albert Lasker Award (2012) Wiley Prize in Biomedical Science (2012) |
James A. Spudich (born in Benld, Illinois) of Croatian ancestry is the Douglass M. and Nola Leishman Professor of Biochemistry and of Cardiovascular Disease at Stanford University and works on the molecular basis of muscle contraction. He was awarded the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award in 2012 with Michael Sheetz and Ronald Vale. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
He earned his B.S. in chemistry from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he worked in John Woodland Hastings's lab on the topic of bioluminescence, and helped Hastings teach in the physiology course at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. He earned his Ph.D. in biochemistry from Stanford University under the guidance from Arthur Kornberg. He later did his postdoctoral research at Stanford University with Charles Yanofsky and at MRC in the Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Hugh Huxley.
His research is focused on studying molecular motors particularly myosin. With Huxley, he started working on an actin/myosin/ATP model for molecular motors, proposing that myosin would ratchet actin and exert a stroke. Spudich first attempted to create an in vitro setup with actin and myosin. However, he faced great difficulty aligning actin filaments. In 1982 he and Michael Sheetz started to work on the alga Nitella, which has long oriented actin fibers, and observed myosin coated beads moving along actin filaments. This provided strong clues about the molecular transport of intracellular cargo, later refined to observing a single step of a single myosin molecule. His research and its place in the overal development of the motility field has been described in a number of well-cited review articles.
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