I would probably become stale if I didn't have this long list of people to work with. Errors in these signals cause some hereditary diseases including primary hyperoxaluria, which causes kidney stones at an early age, as well as some forms of inherited high cholesterol and illnesses like cystic fibrosis that occur when proteins fail to reach their proper positions within a cell. Ralf Pettersson, professor of molecular biology at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, dramatized the importance of the signals Blobel discovered by displaying an aerial picture of New York City. Blobel, a cellular and molecular biologist, discovered in the early 1970s that newly made proteins carry the signals. During the next 20 years, he illuminated the details of how the signals work.
Proteins are long, folded chainlike molecules made up of building blocks called amino acids.
The signals Blobel found are particular sequences of amino acids found either at one end of a protein or within it. Specific signals determine whether a protein will end up in a specific compartment of a cell, lodge in the cell wall or be exported from the cell. Blobel's work also solved the mystery of how proteins enter the tightly sealed compartments within a cell, the organelles. Tweaking cells to churn out drugs Blobel's research lead other scientists to develop the remarkable lab procedures in which cells are slightly altered to make then churn out drugs such as insulin, human growth hormone, and a substance used during chemotherapy that helps in the production of bone marrow. Simplified cell diagram shows proteins with the 'signal sequence,' or address tag, discovered by Nobel Prize winner Guenter Blobel.