Holley, Robert William

Holley, Robert William

(born Jan. 28, 1922, Urbana, Ill., U.S.—died Feb. 11, 1993, Los Gatos, Calif.) U.S. biochemist. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. Holley and others showed that transfer RNA was involved in the assembly of amino acids into proteins. He was the first to determine the sequence of nucleotides in a nucleic acid, a process that required digesting the molecule with enzymes, identifying the pieces, and then figuring out how they fit together. It has since been shown that all transfer RNA has a similar structure. He shared a 1968 Nobel Prize with Marshall Warren Nirenberg and Har Gobind Khorana.

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Holley, Robert William 

Born Jan. 28, 1922, in Urbana, 111. American biochemist.

Holley graduated from the University of Illinois in 1942. He has worked in various research centers of Cornell University, including V. du Vigneaud’s laboratory (1943–47), the New York State Agricultural Experimental Station (1948–57), the US Plant, Soil, and Nutrition Laboratory (1957–64), and the department of biochemistry and molecular biology (1965–66). Since 1966 he has worked at the Salk Institute. Holley’s primary work has dealt with decoding the structure of transfer RNA. In 1965 he determined the structure of the transfer RNA of alanine. He shared a Nobel Prize in 1968 with M. Nirenberg and H. G. Khorana.

REFERENCE

Venkstern, T. V. Pervichnaia struktura transportnykh ribonukleinovykh kislot. Moscow, 1970.