Tokyo Institute of Technology

摘要

The Tokyo Institute of Technology's Professor Masasuke Yoshida has helped elucidate the structure and the functioning of nature's smallest motor. Yoshida verified a crucial facet of the enzymatic mechanism hypothesized by the American biochemist Paul Boyer for the synthesis of adenosine triphosphate (ATP}-thc universal energy carrier in cells. Previnusly, Yoshida participated in a group that helped verify the chemtosmotic coupling mechanism hypothesized by the British biochemist Peter Mitchell for ATP synthesis. For the discoveries corroborated by Yoshida, Mitchell received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1978, and Boyer shared half of that prize with the British biochemist John Walker in 1997.