Exclusive: The work of Nobel Prize winners in chemistry is closely related to the Weizmann Institute

Varschel and Levitt were faculty members and Karpelos joined them in the research on sabbatical.

As we reported earlier todayProf. Martin Karpelos from Harvard University, Michael Levitt from Stanford and Prof. Arie Warshel from the University of Southern California won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for combining computer models of chemistry and quantum physics. However, two of them have a record of being faculty members at the Weizmann Institute and the third came to them for joint research from time to time.

Prof. Amnon Horowitz from the Department of Structural Biology at the Weizmann Institute says in an interview with the science website that the connection of the winners to the Weizmann Institute is much closer than just the doctorate that Prof. Warschel did at the Weizmann Institute. Warshel then continued as a researcher at the institute and also Michael Levitt, one of the partners of the award, was a faculty member at the institute until the early nineties, and to this day he continues as a visiting professor for many months a year. According to Prof. Horowitz, also the third partner for the award, Prof. Karpelos was on sabbatical at the institute at least once a year. "The work itself stemmed from initial research by Warshel and Levit under the guidance of the late Prof. Shneor Lipson." says Prof. Horowitz.

What can you tell us about the work itself?
"The work is computational, theoretical work whose motivation at the beginning was to try to understand how proteins fold. Proteins are composed of amino acids. There are twenty amino acids in nature and a protein can be thought of as a series of beads on a string with each bead being an amino acid. The beads come in 20 different 'colors', and the important point is that the order of the beads determines the structure. As soon as you set a certain order, the thread folds and a unique structure is created that is important for the activity of the protein. Proteins such as hemoglobin, insulin - each has its own unique structure determined by the order of the 'beads' - the amino acids. This is a kind of riddle that nature solves all the time day by day hour by hour: given the right order, nature knows what the structure should be and the protein folds into the correct structure, while the goal of scientists for decades is to make this prediction on a computer."

"They developed tools that allow the process to be imitated on a computer. The problem is still not solved, to this day but the tools themselves have become useful for other more 'smaller' problems. For example, when you solve the structure of a protein with the help of crystallography, as Ada Yonat did, then the resulting structure is not completely correct, it needs to be corrected and this needs to be corrected using the computational tools that these three have developed. Or if you want to understand how a drug binds to a receptor in a computational way, use these tools.

Is there any significance to the ability to calculate?
"The fact that the ability to calculate has greatly improved has changed the picture and makes it possible to shorten the time - the folding process takes time and the computer's ability to model it 40 years ago was limited. Today it is possible to do longer simulations. It is possible to describe the protein more precisely than they did then. There was certainly great progress, but the basic question with which they started then is still open.

Update 16:35 - Official response from the Weizmann Institute

The Weizmann Institute congratulates the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

The Weizmann Institute of Science warmly congratulates the newlyweds for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Two of the three have close ties to the Weizmann Institute of Science, and their work, which uses computers to map chemical reactions between large molecules, such as enzymes, on an atomic scale, began at the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Prof. Aryeh Warshel and Prof. Michael Levitt began their scientific collaboration at the Weizmann Institute of Science when Warshel was a PhD student at the institute, in the late 60s of the 20th century. Both worked with the late Prof. Shneor Lipson in the Department of Chemical Physics. Together they developed a computer program for simulating molecules, which they ran on "Golem" - the institute's computer, which at the time was considered a powerful computational tool. The software was particularly relevant for large biological molecules.

After completing his PhD at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Worschel worked with this year's third winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Prof. Martin Karpelos, at Harvard University. Together they developed a model of the retinal molecule (the vision pigment), and thus succeeded for the first time in combining the construction of classical models of a molecule at rest, and a glimpse of how a molecule works using the methods of quantum physics.
Warschel and Levitt met again at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1972. The Nobel Prize website notes that both "aimed high." They developed a computer program "that was revolutionary because it could be used on all types of molecules". They also found a way to optimize the software by focusing on the most interesting parts of the molecule. Later, they made a significant contribution to the field of computational biology through models that simulate the way proteins work.

Michael Levitt is a resident of the USA, UK and Israel. He was born in 1947 in Pretoria, South Africa and received his doctorate in 1971 from Cambridge University in England. He was on the scientific faculty of the Weizmann Institute of Science from the late 70s to the early 80s, and currently holds the Robert Vivian Cahill Chair in Cancer Research at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California. Prof. Levitt is a frequent visiting professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Prof. Aryeh Warshel is an Israeli and American citizen. He was born in 1940 in Kibbutz Sde-Nahum. In 1969 he received a doctorate from the Weizmann Institute of Science, and was a senior researcher at the institute between 1972 and 1978. He is currently a senior professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.