Studies on the Structural Basis of Ribonuclease Activity

This brief note was the product of Anfinsen's one-year postdoctoral fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation at the Carlsberg Laboratory in Copenhagen. It was Anfinsen's second tour at the laboratory; his first in 1939-1940 was cut short due the outbreak of World War II. Working with the Danish biochemist Kaj Linderstrom-Lang and others, Anfinsen conducted an in-depth physical analysis of the structure of ribonuclease, or Rnase. The group suggested that only a relatively small part of the Rnase molecule, the "active center," is directly involved in catalytic activity, and therefore an ordered secondary structure in a protein was unnecessary for its properties as a catalyst. This conclusion was largely disproven by Anfinsen's subsequent research into amino acid sequencing and protein folding in the 1960s.