STRUCTURE IS THE KEY

All life is based on structures. And knowing these structure is the foundation for understanding life. Poul Nissen, the recipient of the 2017 Novo Nordisk Prize, has studied the basic structures that create coherence in living organisms his whole life.

Understanding life is all about breaking things into bits and pieces. Already as a child, Poul Nissen often took objects apart to understand how they work. As a scientist, he has continued to do this and he has determined some of the most complicated structures of biological molecules and system such as ribosomes and ion pumps.

“You cannot understand how a bike works until you actually see it and watch someone riding it. Then you actually start understanding it. Similarly, with X-ray crystallography, we need to take many different snapshots to realise how things work,” Poul Nissen, Professor at the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Aarhus University, explains.

Poul Nissen has spent most of his career applying and refining X-ray techniques so that they can be used to determine some of the most basic structures in biology to answer questions about life. He hopes that understanding the structures and mechanisms of biological molecules ultimately will help to develop new biotechnology, and to understand and cure disease. A good example is the structure of the crucial sodium and potassium pump (Na-K pump) – a structure Poul Nissen’s team solved in 2007.

“The Na-K pump generates steep ion gradients that enable many other substances to be transported in and out of cells. So when a pump does not work well – if it has a mutation, for example, it can cause a central nervous system disease. Understanding how the pump works will tell us where it goes wrong in the process of the function to which it is coupled. And ultimately help in finding a cure for a disease.”

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