Günter Blobel

Günter Blobel (born May 21, 1936, Waltersdorf, Silesia, Germany [now Niegosławice, Poland]—died February 18, 2018, New York, New York, U.S.) was a German-born American cellular and molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1999 for his discovery that proteins have signals that govern their movement and position in the cell.

Blobel received a medical degree at Eberhard-Karl University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1960 and in 1967 earned a Ph.D. in oncology at the University of Wisconsin. That year he joined the Rockefeller University protein laboratory in New York City, then led by George Palade. In 1976 Blobel became a professor at the university, and in 1992 he was named John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Professor. Blobel obtained U.S. citizenship in the 1980s.

While in Palade’s laboratory, Blobel began studying the transport and localization of proteins in cells. There are about one billion protein molecules in a cell, and they perform a wide variety of specific functions. Some are used inside cells as structural material for building new cell components, whereas others serve as enzymes that speed up biochemical reactions. Still others must be transported to the cell membrane so they can be exported outside the cell to circulate in the blood to other parts of the body. For two decades, however, scientists did not understand two critical details of protein processing: how newly produced proteins are routed to their correct location in the cell, and how proteins pass through the membrane that surrounds each organelle.

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By 1980 Blobel had established the general principles underlying the mechanism by which proteins are targeted to specific organelles within a cell. Working in collaboration with other research groups, he conducted a series of experiments showing that each protein carries an address code within its molecular structure, a signal sequence that directs it to the proper locale inside the cell. The address code, which consists of a sequence of amino acids, specifies whether the protein will pass through the membrane of a specific organelle, become integrated into the membrane, or be exported out of the cell. Blobel also concluded that proteins enter organelles through a porelike channel that opens in the organelle’s outer membrane when the correct protein arrives at the organelle.

Blobel’s later research focused specifically on a porelike channel in the nuclear envelope (the membrane surrounding the cell nucleus). This channel came to be known as the nuclear pore complex (NPC). The NPC is one of the largest protein-based components found in cells and provides the main method of transport for proteins between the cytoplasm and the nucleus. Blobel was primarily concerned with determining the structure of the NPC and employed various methods to conduct this research, including X-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. Blobel and his team of researchers discovered that the NPC is made up mostly of proteins called nucleoporins. The team also identified and described a number of NPC transport factors that recognize the signal sequences in proteins and enable the passage of these proteins into the nucleus. Blobel also studied lamins, which are proteins involved in providing structural support to the nucleus.

Blobel’s work shed light on diseases such as cystic fibrosis, in which dysfunctional ion transporters give rise to abnormalities in cellular enzyme and protein transport. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Blobel received several other awards during his career, including the Louisa Gross Horowitz Prize (1987) and the Albert Lasker Basic Medical Research Award (1993). Blobel also was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator (the HHMI is a philanthropic foundation that subsidizes biomedical research in the United States).