Stanford chemist wins national award for enzyme research

Chemist Edward I. Solomon of Portola Valley, Calif., will be honored April 3 by the world's largest scientific society for his fundamental insights into the structure and action of metal-based enzymes, which help regulate a variety of functions in the body. He will receive the 2001 Award in Inorganic Chemistry from the American Chemical Society at its 221st national meeting in San Diego.

"I use spectroscopy - that is, many energies of light - to understand chemical behavior and how it relates to reactivity," said Solomon, who is Monroe E. Spaght professor of chemistry at Stanford University. "I'm particularly interested in metal sites in enzymes."

Enzymes, a class of proteins, are the body's highly skilled construction workers, building or breaking down other proteins as well as hormones, brain messengers and such, as needed. Often a metal atom, nestled precisely within an enzyme's active site, orchestrates the assembly or cleavage.

With spectroscopic instruments, "we can look right at the electrons around the metal center," said Solomon. "Electron density and distribution gives us key insights as to how it works."

A recent project is studying enzymes with iron centers, but without the ring, or heme, structure characteristic of hemoglobin. Examples include phenylalanine hydroxylase, the enzyme whose inherited dysfunction means people cannot process compounds such as NutraSweet correctly.

"We've developed new spectroscopic methods that have shown us that these non-heme sites function in an elegant but fundamentally very different way than heme sites," he said, even though the metal atom itself is the same.

Solomon said he has been interested in science almost as long as he can remember. "In grade school it was the telescope and chemistry set, and by junior high I had a chemistry lab in the garage," he said. In high school he was a finalist in the Westinghouse (now Intel) science talent search.

The physical inorganic chemist received his undergraduate degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1968 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1972. His post-doctoral work included research at both the H.C. Orsted Institute, Copenhagen, and the California Institute of Technology. He is a member of the ACS division of inorganic chemistry.

The ACS Award in Inorganic Chemistry is sponsored by Aldrich Chemical Co. Inc.