Les premiers « replieurs » français : Michel Goldberg à l’Institut Pasteur et Jeannine Yon à Orsay

Abstract

The First French « Protein Folders »: Michel Goldberg at the Pasteur Institute and Jeannine Yon at Orsay Proteins, the building blocks of life, have since the 1930s been the object of studies to gain a better understanding of the formation of their three-dimensional structure. This structure, called conformation, determines the function of the protein. At the beginning of the 1960s, Anfinsen’s hypothesis stipulated that the protein’s conformation in a natural state in which the protein is functioning, corresponds to the state in which free energy was at its lowest. A thermodynamic principle therefore explained the protein folding. At the same time, at the Institut Pasteur, Jacques Monod and his colleagues were interested in the phenomena of regulation that takes place in the cell. The allosteric model, which was developed by this group, had a huge influence on the work of two French researchers, Michel Goldberg and Jeannine Yon. Yon was a specialist in enzymes and had studied the changes in conformation that accompany the formation of the enzyme-base complex. Goldberg was a young Polytechnician who had converted to biology. Having chosen the Institut Pasteur as the site of his research, Goldberg was at the heart of the discussions that marked the beginning of molecular biology in France. The work of these two researchers permitted new debate on Anfinsen’s hypothesis by showing that the control of the « repliement » was not only thermodynamic but was, equally, kinetic : one should from this point study the folding speed and the intermediary stages. The protein folding still constitutes important research today. These two researchers participated in the birth of the proteomics, the emerging discipline that permits making use of the knowledge of sequencing in different genomes and, also allows better understand of certain diseases caused by folding anomalies, such as Alzheimer and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases.