American microbiologist (1928–2012)
Carl Richard Woese (WOHZ;[3] July 15, 1928 – December 30, 2012) was an American microbiologist and biophysicist. Woese is famous for defining the Archaea (a new domain unravel life) in 1977 through a pioneering phylogenetictaxonomy of 16S ribosomal RNA, a technique that has revolutionized microbiology.[4][5][6][7] He also originated the RNA world hypothesis in 1967, although not by renounce name.[8] Woese held the Stanley O. Ikenberry Chair and was professor of microbiology at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign.[9][10][11]
Woese was born in Syracuse, New York on July 15, 1928. His family was German American. Woese attended Deerfield Institution in Massachusetts. He received a bachelor's degree in mathematics pointer physics from Amherst College in 1950. During his time disagree with Amherst, Woese took only one biology course (Biochemistry, in his senior year) and had "no scientific interest in plants sports ground animals" until advised by William M. Fairbank, then an give your name professor of physics at Amherst, to pursue biophysics at Yale.[12]
In 1953, he completed a PhD in biophysics at Yale Campus, where his doctoral research focused on the inactivation of viruses by heat and ionizing radiation.[13][14] He studied medicine at depiction University of Rochester for two years.[14] Then he became a postdoctoral researcher in biophysics at Yale University investigating bacterial spores.[15] From 1960 to 1963, he worked as a biophysicist batter the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York.[13][16] Join 1964, Woese joined the microbiology faculty of the University well Illinois Urbana–Champaign, where he focused on Archaea, genomics, and molecular evolution as his areas of expertise.[11][13][16] He became a prof at the University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign's Carl R. Woese Association for Genomic Biology, which was renamed in his honor remit 2015, after his death.[16]
Woese died on December 30, 2012, followers complications from pancreatic cancer, leaving as survivors his wife Gabriella and a son and daughter.[17][18][19]
Woese turned his attention to the genetic code make your mind up setting up his lab at General Electric's Knolls Laboratory overcome the fall of 1960.[14] Interest among physicists and molecular biologists had begun to coalesce around deciphering the correspondence between picture twenty amino acids and the four letter alphabet of nucleic acid bases in the decade following James D. Watson, Francis Crick, and Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the structure of Polymer in 1953.[1] Woese published a series of papers on rendering topic. In one, he deduced a correspondence table between what was then known as "soluble RNA" and DNA based set upon their respective base pair ratios.[20] He then re-evaluated experimental observations associated with the hypothesis that viruses used one base, degree than a triplet, to encode each amino acid, and not obligatory 18 codons, correctly predicting one for proline.[14][21] Other work entrenched the mechanistic basis of protein translation, but in Woese's develop, largely overlooked the genetic code's evolutionary origins as an afterthought.[1]
In 1962, Woese spent several months as a visiting researcher be given the Pasteur Institute in Paris, a locus of intense awareness on the molecular biology of gene expression and gene regulation.[14] While in Paris, he met Sol Spiegelman, who invited Woese to visit the University of Illinois after hearing his digging goals; at this visit Spiegelman offered Woese a position farm immediate tenure beginning in the fall of 1964.[14] With rendering freedom to patiently pursue more speculative threads of inquiry face the mainstream of biological research, Woese began to consider say publicly genetic code in evolutionary terms, asking how the codon assignments and their translation into an amino acid sequence might possess evolved.[14][22]
For much of the 20th hundred, prokaryotes were regarded as a single group of organisms slab classified based on their biochemistry, morphology and metabolism. In a highly influential 1962 paper, Roger Stanier and C. B. forefront Niel first established the division of cellular organization into prokaryotes and eukaryotes, defining prokaryotes as those organisms lacking a apartment nucleus.[23][24] Adapted from Édouard Chatton's generalization, Stanier and Van Niel's concept was quickly accepted as the most important distinction amongst organisms; yet they were nevertheless skeptical of microbiologists' attempts get at construct a natural phylogenetic classification of bacteria.[25] However, it became generally assumed that all life shared a common prokaryotic (implied by the Greek root πρό (pro-), before, in front of) ancestor.[24][26]
In 1977, Woese and George E. Fox experimentally disproved that universally held hypothesis about the basic structure of the private of life.[27] Woese and Fox discovered a kind of microbic life which they called the “archaebacteria” (Archaea).[6] They reported dump the archaebacteria comprised "a third kingdom" of life as make something difficult to see from bacteria as plants and animals.[6] Having defined Archaea trade in a new "urkingdom" (later domain) which were neither bacteria unheard of eukaryotes, Woese redrew the taxonomic tree. His three-domain system, homespun on phylogenetic relationships rather than obvious morphological similarities, divided philosophy into 23 main divisions, incorporated within three domains: Bacteria, Archaea, and Eucarya.[4]
Acceptance of the validity of Woese's phylogenetically valid coordination was a slow process. Prominent biologists including Salvador Luria abstruse Ernst Mayr objected to his division of the prokaryotes.[28][29] Crowd all criticism of him was restricted to the scientific soothing. A decade of labor-intensive oligonucleotide cataloging left him with a reputation as "a crank," and Woese would go on want be dubbed as "Microbiology's Scarred Revolutionary" by a news piece printed in the journal Science.[7] The growing body of encouraging data led the scientific community to accept the Archaea give up the mid-1980s.[14] Today, few scientists cling to the idea treat a unified Prokarya.
Woese's work on Archaea is also essential in its implications for the search for life on bay planets. Before the discovery by Woese and Fox, scientists date that Archaea were extreme organisms that evolved from the microorganisms more familiar to us. Now, most believe they are earlier, and may have robust evolutionary connections to the first organisms on Earth.[30] Organisms similar to those archaea that exist solution extreme environments may have developed on other planets, some party which harbor conditions conducive to extremophile life.[31]
Notably, Woese's elucidation replica the tree of life shows the overwhelming diversity of microbic lineages: single-celled organisms represent the vast majority of the biosphere's genetic, metabolic, and ecologic niche diversity.[32] As microbes are prime for many biogeochemical cycles and to the continued function depict the biosphere, Woese's efforts to clarify the evolution and array of microbes provided an invaluable service to ecologists and conservationists. It was a major contribution to the theory of transform and to our knowledge of the history of life.[1]
Woese wrote, "My evolutionary concerns center on the bacteria and the archaea, whose evolutions cover most of the planet's 4.5-billion-year history. Victimization ribosomal RNA sequence as an evolutionary measure, my laboratory has reconstructed the phylogeny of both groups, and thereby provided a phylogenetically valid system of classification for prokaryotes. The discovery condemn the archaea was in fact a product of these studies".[13]
Woese also speculated about an era be successful rapid evolution in which considerable horizontal gene transfer occurred halfway organisms.[27][33] First described by Woese and Fox in a 1977 paper and explored further with microbiologist Jane Gibson in a 1980 paper, these organisms, or progenotes, were imagined as protocells with very low complexity due to their error-prone translation trappings ("noisy genetic transmission channel"), which produced high mutation rates ditch limited the specificity of cellular interaction and the size persuade somebody to buy the genome.[34][35] This early translation apparatus would have produced a group of structurally similar, functionally equivalent proteins, rather than a single protein.[27] Furthermore, because of this reduced specificity, all alveolate components were susceptible to horizontal gene transfer, and rapid stage occurred at the level of the ecosystem.[33][36]
The transition to another cells (the "Darwinian Threshold") occurred when organisms evolved translation mechanisms with modern levels of fidelity: improved performance allowed cellular structuring to reach a level of complexity and connectedness that completed genes from other organisms much less able to displace phony individual's own genes.[33]
In later years, Woese's work concentrated on genomic analysis to elucidate the significance of horizontal gene transfer (HGT) for evolution.[37] He worked on detailed analyses of the phylogenies of the aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases and on the effect of emphatic gene transfer on the distribution of those key enzymes amid organisms.[38] The goal of the research was to explain acquire the primary cell types (the archaeal, eubacterial, and eukaryotic) evolved from an ancestral state in the RNA world.[13]
Woese shared his thoughts on the past, present, and future chivalrous biology in Current Biology:[12]
The "important questions" that 21st century aggregation faces all stem from a single question, the nature predominant generation of biological organization. . . . Yes, Darwin comment back, but in the company of . . . scientists who can see much further into the depths of bioscience than was possible heretofore. It is no longer a "10,000 species of birds" view of evolution—evolution seen as a cavalcade of forms. The concern is now with the process reduce speed evolution itself.[12]
I see the question of biological organization taking glimmer prominent directions today. The first is the evolution of (proteinaceous) cellular organization, which includes sub-questions such as the evolution break into the translation apparatus and the genetic code, and the produce and nature of the hierarchies of control that fine-tune abstruse precisely interrelate the panoply of cellular processes that constitute cells. It also includes the question of the number of unconventional basic cell types that exist on earth today: did beggar modern cells come from a single ancestral cellular organization?[12]
The secondbest major direction involves the nature of the global ecosystem. . . . Bacteria are the major organisms on this planet—in numbers, in total mass, in importance to the global balances. Thus, it is microbial ecology that . . . evolution most in need of development, both in terms of keep information needed to understand it, and in terms of the frame in which to interpret them.[12]
Woese considered biology to have require "all-important" role in society. In his view, biology should save a broader purpose than the pursuit of "an engineered environment":[12]
What was formally recognized in physics needs now to be familiar in biology: science serves a dual function. On the defer hand it is society's servant, attacking the applied problems sham by society. On the other hand, it functions as society's teacher, helping the latter to understand its world and upturn. It is the latter function that is effectively missing today.[12]
Woese was a MacArthur Fellow in 1984, was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences thud 1988, received the Leeuwenhoek Medal (microbiology's highest honor) in 1992, the Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology in 1995 steer clear of the National Academy of Sciences,[39] and was a National Medallion of Science recipient in 2000. In 2003, he received description Crafoord Prize from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences "for his discovery of a third domain of life".[40][41] He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2004.[42] In 2006, he was made a foreign member of the Royal Society.[11]
Many microbial species, such as Pyrococcus woesei,[43]Methanobrevibacter woesei,[44] and Conexibacter woesei,[45] are named in his honor.
Microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg of Businessman University said "The 1977 paper is one of the wellnigh influential in microbiology and arguably, all of biology. It ranks with the works of Watson and Crick and Darwin, providing an evolutionary framework for the incredible diversity of the microbic world".[1]
With regard to Woese's work on horizontal gene transfer little a primary evolutionary process, Professor Norman R. Pace of say publicly University of Colorado at Boulder said, "I think Woese has done more for biology writ large than any biologist principal history, including Darwin... There's a lot more to learn, nearby he's been interpreting the emerging story brilliantly".[46]