Axel T. Brunger (born November 25, 1956) is a

German American German Americans (german: Deutschamerikaner, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 43 million in 2019, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the Unite ...

biophysicist. He is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, and a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

Investigator. He served as the Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology (2013–2017).

Early life

Brunger was born in Leipzig, Germany, on November 25, 1956. He graduated with a degree in Physics and Mathematics from the University of Hamburg in 1977. He completed his Diplom in Physics from the University of Hamburg in 1980. He completed his PhD in Biophysics from Technical University of Munich in 1982, advised by Klaus Schulten.

Academic career

Brunger held a NATO postdoctoral fellowship to work with

Martin Karplus Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930) is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of St ...

at Harvard University, where he subsequently became a research associate in the Department of Chemistry after a brief return to Germany. He joined the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry department at Yale University in 1987 and moved to

in 2000. Brunger was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and won the inaugural

DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences The DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences is a prize in the field of computational biology. It is awarded annually for "the most accessible and innovative development or application of computer technology to enhance research in the life scienc ...

in 2011.

Research

Brunger is known for developing a computer program called CNS used for solving structures based on

X-ray diffraction X-ray crystallography is the experimental science determining the atomic and molecular structure of a crystal, in which the crystalline structure causes a beam of incident X-rays to diffract into many specific directions. By measuring the angles ...

or solution NMR data, which was first released in 1992. The program is a major extension of a 1987 program developed with

John Kuriyan John Kuriyan is the Dean of Basic Sciences and a Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He was formerly the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Molecular and Cell Bi ...

and Karplus called

X-PLOR X-PLOR is a computer software package for computational structural biology originally developed by Axel T. Brunger at Yale University. It was first published in 1987 as an offshoot of CHARMM - a similar program that ran on supercomputers made by C ...

, whose original inspiration was motivated by

Marius Clore G. Marius Clore MAE, FRSC, FRS is a British-born, Anglo-American molecular biophysicist and structural biologist. He was born in London, U.K. and is a dual US/U.K. Citizen. He is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the R ...

's efforts in interpreting NMR data and which has been extended by Clore's continued development of

XPLOR-NIH Xplor-NIH is a highly sophisticated and flexible biomolecular structure determination program which includes an interface to the legacy X-PLOR program. The main developers are Charles Schwieters and Marius Clore of the National Institutes of Heal ...

. These programs make use of a method called simulated annealing in conjunction with molecular dynamics to refine protein structures. X-PLOR was the first time a modern optimization technique was applied to the problem of crystallographic refinement. Brunger also subsequently introduced the RFree technique to cross-validate the model given the observed data. In the mid-1990s, his team extended X-PLOR into a complete system to solve structures, which then became the more full-featured tool CNS, capable of performing a series of steps necessary for crystallography structure determination, such as obtaining phases from experimental data and molecular replacement phasing from known homologous structures. Brunger's research group currently studies the molecular mechanism of synaptic vesicle fusion in neurotransmission.

References

External links

Biography of Axel T. Brunger

Profile of Axel T. Brunger

PNAS Inaugural Profile

Website of Axel T. Brunger
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brunger, Axel T. 1956 births 21st-century American physicists University of Hamburg alumni Technical University of Munich alumni German emigrants to the United States Harvard University staff Yale Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry faculty Living people Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Crystallographers Stanford University School of Medicine faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences