Abstract
The year 2004 marks the 50th anniversary of the discovery of cytochrome P450. Minor J. (Jud) Coon has been a leader in this field for the last 35 years. This review summarizes his contributions to P450 research by discussing six of his most significant publications; not surprisingly, these papers serve as landmarks for the major directions followed in P450 research.
Footnotes
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↵1 Martin Klingenberg (Klingenberg, 2003) notes that his initial observation of a P450-CO spectrum was made in November 1954 but was not published until 1958. David Garfinkel joined the laboratory in 1955.
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↵2 Ron Estabrook published a similar version of the catalytic cycle in the same issue of this journal (Estabrook et al., 1973) and an earlier, less elaborate version in 1971 (Estabrook et al., 1971).
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↵3 Several reviews on the early history of P450 have recently appeared; in addition to those cited here (Lu, 1998; Coon, 2002; Klingenberg, 2003), personal accounts by Gil Mannering (Mannering, 2001) and Allan Conney (Conney, 2003), and an early account by David Cooper (Cooper, 1973) are also of interest.
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Supported by National Science Foundation Grant MCB-9808636. A lecture and poster of this review were presented at the session honoring Minor J. Coon at the “12th International Conference on Cytochrome P450: Biochemistry, Biophysics and Molecular Biology” in La Grande Motte, France, in September 2001.
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Todd D. Porter received a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Illinois in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the same institution in 1981. His graduate work was with Martin Schulman on the induction of drug-metabolizing enzymes by ethanol feeding. He carried out postdoctoral research with Charles Kasper at the University of Wisconsin, working on cytochrome P450 reductase, and was an Assistant Professor under Jud Coon at Michigan from 1986 to 1991, where they pioneered the use of bacteria for the expression of cytochrome P450. He has continued his research in this area, publishing a number of articles on the use of bacteria for biotechnological and enzymological investigations of cytochrome P450 and cytochrome P450 reductase.
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Dr. Porter is an Associate Professor in the College of Pharmacy at the University of Kentucky and also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Graduate Center for Toxicology under Dr. Mary Vore. He is on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Biochemical and Molecular Toxicology.
- Received August 14, 2003.
- Accepted September 2, 2003.
- The American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics
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