Gary Ackers

Gary Keith Ackers
Born	1939
Died	2011
Known for	Agarose gel chromatography
Scientific career
Fields	Thermodynamic linkage analysis of biological macromolecules, cooperative O2 binding to hemoglobin
Institutions	Washington University in St. Louis

Gary Keith Ackers (1939 - 2011) ^[1] was Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics of Washington University School of Medicine.

His research focused on thermodynamic linkage analysis of biological macromolecules, addressing the molecular mechanism of cooperative O₂ binding to human hemoglobin since the early 1970s. He was a Fellow of the Biophysical Society and one of the founders of the annual Gibbs Conference. ^[2]

Ackers invented agarose gel chromatography when he was a teenager. He went on the develop analytical gel chromatography methods for determinations of many important characteristics of water-soluble proteins; diffusion coefficient, molecular size, ^{[3] [4]} thermodynamics of protein-protein interactions including important changes due to single amino acid substitutions. ^[5]

References

1. "Obituary - Gary K. Ackers". Biophysical Society. August 2011. Retrieved 15 July 2013.
2. Gary Ackers Archived 2010-06-07 at the Wayback Machine faculty page at Washington University in St. Louis. Accessed on 2010-02-01.
3. Ackers GK (1967). "Molecular sieve studies of interacting protein systems. I. Equations for transport of associating systems". J. Biol. Chem. 242 (13): 3026–3034. doi: 10.1016/S0021-9258(18)95928-4 . PMID   6027787.
4. Ackers GK (1969). "Molecular sieve studies of interacting protein systems. IV. Molecular size of the D-amino acid oxidase apoenzyme subunit". J. Biol. Chem. 244 (2): 465–470. doi: 10.1016/S0021-9258(18)94452-2 . PMID   4388073.
5. Pettigrew DW, Romeo PH, Tsapis A, Thillet J, Smith ML, Turner BW, Ackers GK (1982). "Probing the energetics of proteins through structural perturbation: sites of regulatory energy in human hemoglobin". PNAS . 79 (6): 1849–1853. Bibcode:1982PNAS...79.1849P. doi: 10.1073/pnas.79.6.1849 . PMC   346078 . PMID   6952235.