Presentation Speech by Professor Ralf Pettersson of the , December 10, 1999. Translation of the Swedish text. Professor Ralf Pettersson delivering the Presentation Speech for the 1999 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at the Stockholm Concert Hall.   Your Majesties, Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen, Imagine a large factory that manufactures…

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In 1980 Blobel proposed that newly made proteins are targeted to and imported into the various organelles within the cell by built-in signal sequences. The signals are short stretches of amino acids encoded by the gene specifying the protein. They can be located at either end of the protein, or somewhere internally.

Scientific Advisors, Professors at Karolinska Institutet: Bo Angelin – Clinical Metabolism Bertil Daneholt – Molecular Genetics Hans Jörnvall – Physiological Chemistry Ralf Pettersson – Molecular Biology Nils Ringertz – Medical Cell Genetics and Secretary of the Nobel Assembly Art Director: Urban Frank Computer Graphics: Deborah Strand Medical Writer: Anders Nystrand Photo: Ilpo Okkonen,Oulu, Finland (Picture…

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The organization of a cell can be compared to that of a big city such as New York. In order to reach its correct destination, a letter has to be provided with an address label and a zip code, similar to the address tags on proteins.

In many inherited diseases, proteins are mislocalized in the cell due to errors in targeting signals and transport. One example is “primary hyperoxaluria,” a rare disease, which results in kidney stones already at an early age. A signal in the enzyme alanine:glyoxylate aminotransferase normally directs it to the peroxisome. In patients, this signal is altered…

Contents:    These pages are based on material from the 1999 Physiology or Medicine Nobel Poster.

  The Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden, has awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for 1999 to Günter Blobel, for the discovery that “proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in the cell.”       Günter Blobel, born in 1936, works at the Laboratory of Cell Biology,…

Today many important protein drugs (e.g. growth hormone, erythropoetin, insulin) are produced in living cells. To facilitate easy purification, the proteins are provided with a signal peptide causing them to be secreted out of the cell. For scale-up production, cells are grown in bioreactors.