James Rothman’s pioneering research discovered key molecular machinery responsible for transferring materials among compartments within cells. He provided the conceptual framework for understanding important biological processes, including the release of insulin into blood, communication between nerve cells in the brain, and the entry of viruses to infect cells: In a cell-free system, he reconstituted the budding and fusion of tiny membrane-enveloped vesicles that ferry packets of enclosed cargo between cell compartments. He discovered the complex of SNARE proteins that mediates vesicle fusion and affords it its specificity. He also uncovered the so-called GTPase-switch mechanism which controls the budding of coated vesicles in the cell. His contributions to other fields include unveiling how the hsp70 molecular chaperones cycle on and off proteins to control their folding/unfolding, devising the theoretical concept of how the Golgi compartment functions, and providing the first evidence of sequential processing and vectorial transport across the Golgi stack. He currently investigates the biophysics of explosive neurotransmitter release at synapses and the hypothesis that phase separations of Golgin proteins organize its stack of cisternae.
Academic Career
James Rothman studied physics at Yale University in New Haven, USA. He obtained his PhD in biological chemistry from Harvard University in 1976. After postdoctoral research at MIT, he became professor at Stanford University in 1978. He moved on to Princeton University in 1988, then to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, where he founded and chaired the Department of Cellular Biochemistry and Biophysics from 1991 to 2004. He then became the Wu Professor of Chemical Biology and the director of Columbia University’s Sulzberger Genome Center. In 2008, he returned to Yale University as the Sterling Professor and chair of the Department of Cell Biology. He received numerous awards, including the Heinrich Wieland Prize, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Biomedical Research, the Kavli Prize for Neuroscience, and the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Royal Society, and a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
