Nobel laureate and pioneer of molecular cell biology with a passion for buildings
Günter Blobel discovered signposting in proteins and, away from the microscope, helped restore Dresden’s architecture
Dr Günter Blobel was the a Nobel Prize-winning biologist who drew parallels between the beauty of cellular structures and baroque architecture. Blobel, a fellow at New York’s Rockefeller University since
1967, used the money he won for his protein research to mend war-ravaged buildings in his native Germany.
Blobel, who has died aged 81, spent decades studying the movement of proteins, biologically indispensable molecules that transmit signals, defend against viruses or bacteria, transport atoms or molecules, and catalyse chemical reactions. Each human cell contains about a billion proteins, most of which live for several days before they must be replaced by still more proteins of several thousand varieties.
While healthy cells are abuzz with their production and movement, newly formed proteins always seem to know their destination, Blobel and his colleagues observed in the early 1970s. The string-shaped molecules were apparently imbued with a secret code, or were following a hidden blueprint that ensured they reached the correct location within or outside the cell.
“I kept asking myself,” Blobel said in 2004, “If I were to design a system, how would I do it?”
He envisioned a process whose elegance and simplicity would have delighted the architects he had idolised since he was a boy, passing through the streets of Dresden, Germany, days before the city was levelled by British and American bombers in the Second World War.
Proteins, he speculated, are encoded with the molecular equivalent of a postcode or luggage tag, a sequence of amino acids that help a particular protein reach its destination within the cell.
It was the kind of hypothesis that alternately delighted and infuriated his colleagues, some of whom felt that Blobel, a man who threw himself into imaginative speculations throughout his career, strayed too far from established fact. It was also entirely correct.
“He would deny it, but it was almost as if he had one of these streaks of clairvoyance,” says Sanford Simon, a Rockefeller University biophysicist and former student of Blobel. “What he really cared about was the chase of going down and experimentally testing something. He wanted to understand the architecture of the cell.” Blobel laid out the beginnings of his idea with colleague David Sabatini in 1971, and four years later he published an article with Bernhard Dobberstein that outlined the theory in detail.
In place of a postcode, the researchers described a protein’s “signal sequence” which attracts a postmanlike “signal recognition particle” that delivers the protein to its destination, typically a membrane-enclosed cellular feature called an organelle. That delivery particle then helps the protein enter the organelle’s membrane, functioning like a key in a lock.