Gunnar von Heijne

Professor Nils Gunnar Hansson von Heijne, born June 10, 1951 in Gothenburg, is a Swedish scientist[2] working on signal peptides, membrane proteins[3][4][5] and bioinformatics[6][7] at the Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University.

Gunnar von Heijne
Gunnar von Heijne at ISMB in 2012
Born	Nils Gunnar Hansson von Heijne (1951-06-10) June 10, 1951
Nationality	Swedish
Awards	Björkénska priset (1998) Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award[1]
Scientific career
Fields	Royal Institute of Technology
Institutions	Stockholm University, Karolinska Institutet

Education

Gunnar von Heijne graduated 1975 with a Master of Science degree in chemistry and chemical engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).[8] He then became a doctoral student in theoretical physics at KTH, in a research group focussing on statistical mechanics and theoretical biophysics, and was awarded his Ph.D. in 1980.[9] In 1983 he was made docent in theoretical biophysics at KTH, where he remained until 1988. 1982-1985 he was active as a science reporter at Sveriges Radio. 1989-1994 he was active at Karolinska Institutet, and in 1994 he was made a professor in theoretical chemistry at Stockholm University.[8]

Research

von Heijne's research primarily concerns membrane proteins, and he is one of the most cited Swedish scientists in the areas of biochemistry and molecular biology.[10] He heads the Center for Biomembrane Research at Stockholm University.[11]

Awards

In 2012 he was awarded the Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award[1] by the International Society for Computational Biology.

von Heijne is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1997 and a member of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry from 2001 to 2009, and the Committees chairman from 2007 to 2009. In 2008, he received an honorary doctorate at Åbo Akademi.[10]

References

1. Mullins, J.; Morrison Mckay, B. J. (2012). "International Society for Computational Biology Honours Gunnar von Heijne and Ziv Bar-Joseph with Top Bioinformatics/Computational Biology Awards for 2012". PLoS Computational Biology. 8 (5): e1002535. Bibcode:2012PLSCB...8E2535M. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002535. PMC 3364933.
2. https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=saY_ivoAAAAJ Gunnar von Heijne publications in Google Scholar
3. Emanuelsson, O.; Nielsen, H.; Brunak, S. R.; Von Heijne, G. (2000). "Predicting Subcellular Localization of Proteins Based on their N-terminal Amino Acid Sequence". Journal of Molecular Biology. 300 (4): 1005–1016. doi:10.1006/jmbi.2000.3903. PMID 10891285.
4. Nielsen, H.; Engelbrecht, J.; Brunak, S.; Von Heijne, G. (1997). "Identification of prokaryotic and eukaryotic signal peptides and prediction of their cleavage sites". Protein Engineering Design and Selection. 10 (1): 1–6. doi:10.1093/protein/10.1.1. PMID 9051728.
5. Krogh, A.; Larsson, B. R.; Von Heijne, G.; Sonnhammer, E. L. L. (2001). "Predicting transmembrane protein topology with a hidden markov model: Application to complete genomes". Journal of Molecular Biology. 305 (3): 567–580. doi:10.1006/jmbi.2000.4315. PMID 11152613.
6. Dyrløv Bendtsen, J.; Nielsen, H.; Von Heijne, G.; Brunak, S. (2004). "Improved Prediction of Signal Peptides: SignalP 3.0". Journal of Molecular Biology. 340 (4): 783–795. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.165.2784. doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2004.05.028. PMID 15223320.
7. Von Heijne, G. (1986). "A new method for predicting signal sequence cleavage sites". Nucleic Acids Research. 14 (11): 4683–4690. doi:10.1093/nar/14.11.4683. PMC 311474. PMID 3714490.
8. Gunnar von Heijne's CV Archived 2008-12-03 at the Wayback Machine
9. Heijne, Gunnar von (1980): Some theoretical aspects of the structure, function and evolution of biological macromolecules, Diss., Stockholm
10. Press release from Åbo Akademi: Åbo Akademi kreerar fjorton nya hedersdoktorer (in Swedish)
11. Stockholm Center for Biomembrane Research Archived 2009-09-17 at the Wayback Machine, accessed on August 3, 2009