Richard Henderson
Richard Henderson FRS FMedSci born 19 July 1945 is a Scottish molecular biologist and biophysicist and pioneer in the field of electron microscopy of biological molecules. He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2017 with Jacques Dubochet and Joachim Frank
Henderson worked on the structure and mechanism of chymotrypsin for his Ph.D. with David Blow at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. This interest in membrane proteins led to him working on voltage-gated sodium channels as a post-doctoral researcher at Yale University. Returning to the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in 1975, Henderson worked with Nigel Unwin to study the structure of the membrane protein bacteriorhodopsin by electron microscopy. A seminal paper Henderson and Unwin (1975) established a low resolution structural model for bacteriorhodopsin showing the protein to consist of seven transmembrane helices. This paper was important for a number of reasons, not the least of which was that it showed that membrane proteins had well defined structures and that transmembrane alpha-helices could occur. After 1975 Henderson continued to structure of bacteriorhodopsin without Unwin. In 1990 Henderson published an atomic model of bacteriorhodopsin by electron crystallography in the Journal of Molecular Biology.This model was the second ever atomic model of a membrane protein. The techniques Henderson developed for electron crystallography are still in use.
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