1950s Biology: The Mitochondria Era

***Professor Frederick L. Crane started his career as a botanist. He got a BS in Chemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann arbor in 1950 and received his PhD in 1953. Like many scientists of today, his next job was as a post-doctoral fellow and he went to work at at the Enzyme Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became an associate professor on his way to becoming a full professor at Purdue, where he now has Emeritus status.He has received the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Medal for Biochemistry, he has worked for NATO, he even has an honorary medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Sweden. Yet he is most famous not for plants or chemistry, but rather for a beef heart.

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Professor Frederick L. Crane started his career as a botanist. He got a BS in Chemistry from the University of Michigan, Ann arbor in 1950 and received his PhD in 1953. Like many scientists of today, his next job was as a post-doctoral fellow and he went to work at at the Enzyme Institute of the University of Wisconsin, where he became an associate professor on his way to becoming a full professor at Purdue, where he now has Emeritus status.

He has received the American Chemical Society Eli Lilly Medal for Biochemistry, he has worked for NATO, he even has an honorary medical degree from Karolinska Institute in Sweden.

Yet he is most famous not for plants or chemistry, but rather for a beef heart.

Why a beef heart? That's what the job was, the group had a mandate to determine the function of heart mitochondria. It turned out that expertise in plant niacin synthesis was perfect for unraveling one of the giant mysteries of biology in the 1950s.

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CoQ

The term reduced is common in biochemistry and in this case it it means that CoQ has gained an electron, so its valence state has been reduced. What is that the opposite of? Oxidation. CoQ does both when making energy, it changes from an oxidized to a reduced state. That is called a redox system, short for reduction and oxidation.

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How did the name arrive? The quinone they found had originally been called Q-275 but when they found four more they wanted a name for the group so they called them coenzymes, with the Q being for their quinone role. The small subscript is the number of isoprenoid units in the side chain, which is what separates them. That beef hear chain length became Coenzyme Q₁₀.
http://www.drpasswater.com/nutrition_library/Crane_1.html
Quinones in Electron Transport By CIBA Foundation Symposium http://books.google.com/books?id=HicNp_oCEpkC&pg=PA101&lpg=PA101&dq=Enzy...
Oxidoreduction at the Plasma Membranerelation to Growth and Transport, Volume 2
By Frederick L. Crane, D. James Morre, Hans E. Low http://books.google.com/books?id=xcYvi-7abC4C&pg=PA30&lpg=PA30&dq=biogra...

Old NID

137379