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| Douglas Youvan | |
|---|---|
 Douglas Youvan, 2010 | |
| Born | (1955-01-29) January 29, 1955 (age 69) Frontenac, Kansas |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Biophysics |
| Institutions | MIT and Kairos Scientific Inc. |
Douglas Charles Youvan (born January 29, 1955) is an American scientist.
Biography
Youvan received an associate degree in electronics and a bachelor's degree in biology from Pittsburg State University. He received his Ph.D. degree in biophysics from UC Berkeley.
Youvan was an associate professor of chemistry at MIT, where he specialized in the study of photosynthesis, specifically the spectral analysis of photosynthetic bacteria. Youvan, along with Mary M. Yang, developed instrumentation to study the spectra of bacteria directly from a petri dish.
Research focus
In his 1981 Ph.D. thesis, Youvan found inhibitors (hypermodified nucleosides) of retroviral reverse transcriptase present in ribosomal RNA.
His work correctly predicted the secondary structure of the 11 transmembrane helices of the reaction center as confirmed by X-ray crystallography. In 1987 Youvan and E. Bylina constructed the first site-directed mutants of bacterial reaction centers.
References
- Youvan, DC; Hearst, JE (1979). "Reverse transcriptase pauses at N2-methylguanine during in vitro transcription of Escherichia coli 16S ribosomal RNA". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 76 (8): 3751–4. Bibcode:1979PNAS...76.3751Y. doi:10.1073/pnas.76.8.3751. PMC 383911. PMID 91169.
- Youvan, DC; Hearst, JE (1981). "A sequence from Drosophila melanogaster 18S rRNA bearing the conserved hypermodified nucleoside am psi: analysis by reverse transcription and high-performance liquid chromatography". Nucleic Acids Research. 9 (7): 1723–41. doi:10.1093/nar/9.7.1723. PMC 326793. PMID 6164994.
- Govindjee (2005). Discoveries in Photosynthesis. Advances in Photosynthesis and Respiration. Vol. 20. Springer-Verlag. p. 58. ISBN 9781402033247.