Axel T. Brunger (born November 25, 1956) is a

German American German Americans (german: Deutschamerikaner, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. With an estimated size of approximately 43 million in 2019, German Americans are the largest of the self-reported ancestry groups by the Unit ...

biophysicist Biophysics is an interdisciplinary science that applies approaches and methods traditionally used in physics to study biological phenomena. Biophysics covers all scales of biological organization, from molecular to organismic and populations. B ...

. He is Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford University, and a

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, f ...

Investigator. He served as the Chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology (2013–2017).

Early life

Brunger was born in

Leipzig, Germany Leipzig ( , ; Upper Saxon: ) is the most populous city in the German state of Saxony. Leipzig's population of 605,407 inhabitants (1.1 million in the larger urban zone) as of 2021 places the city as Germany's eighth most populous, as wel ...

, on November 25, 1956. He graduated with a degree in Physics and Mathematics from the

University of Hamburg The University of Hamburg (german: link=no, Universität Hamburg, also referred to as UHH) is a public research university in Hamburg, Germany. It was founded on 28 March 1919 by combining the previous General Lecture System ('' Allgemeines Vor ...

in 1977. He completed his Diplom in Physics from the

in 1980. He completed his PhD in Biophysics from

Technical University of Munich The Technical University of Munich (TUM or TU Munich; german: Technische Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It specializes in engineering, technology, medicine, and applied and natural sciences. Establis ...

in 1982, advised by

Klaus Schulten Klaus Schulten (January 12, 1947 – October 31, 2016) was a German-American computational biophysicist and the Swanlund Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Schulten used supercomputing techniques to appl ...

Academic career

Brunger held a NATO postdoctoral fellowship to work with

Martin Karplus Martin Karplus (born March 15, 1930) is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...

, where he subsequently became a research associate in the Department of Chemistry after a brief return to Germany. He joined the Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry department at

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...

in 1987 and moved to Stanford University in 2000. Brunger was elected to the

United States National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nat ...

in 2005 and won the inaugural

DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences The DeLano Award for Computational Biosciences is a prize in the field of computational biology. It is awarded annually for "the most accessible and innovative development or application of computer technology to enhance research in the life scienc ...

in 2011.

Research

Brunger is known for developing a computer program called CNS used for solving structures based on X-ray diffraction or solution NMR data, which was first released in 1992. The program is a major extension of a 1987 program developed with

John Kuriyan John Kuriyan is the Dean of Basic Sciences and a Professor of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. He was formerly the Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Molecular and Cell B ...

and Karplus called

X-PLOR X-PLOR is a computer software package for computational structural biology originally developed by Axel T. Brunger at Yale University. It was first published in 1987 as an offshoot of CHARMM - a similar program that ran on supercomputers made by C ...

, whose original inspiration was motivated by Marius Clore's efforts in interpreting NMR data and which has been extended by Clore's continued development of

XPLOR-NIH Xplor-NIH is a highly sophisticated and flexible biomolecular structure determination program which includes an interface to the legacy X-PLOR program. The main developers are Charles Schwieters and Marius Clore of the National Institutes of Heal ...

. These programs make use of a method called

simulated annealing Simulated annealing (SA) is a probabilistic technique for approximating the global optimum of a given function. Specifically, it is a metaheuristic to approximate global optimization in a large search space for an optimization problem. ...

in conjunction with

molecular dynamics Molecular dynamics (MD) is a computer simulation method for analyzing the physical movements of atoms and molecules. The atoms and molecules are allowed to interact for a fixed period of time, giving a view of the dynamic "evolution" of th ...

to refine protein structures. X-PLOR was the first time a modern optimization technique was applied to the problem of crystallographic refinement. Brunger also subsequently introduced the RFree technique to cross-validate the model given the observed data. In the mid-1990s, his team extended X-PLOR into a complete system to solve structures, which then became the more full-featured tool CNS, capable of performing a series of steps necessary for crystallography structure determination, such as obtaining phases from experimental data and

molecular replacement Molecular replacement (or MR) is a method of solving the phase problem in X-ray crystallography. MR relies upon the existence of a previously solved protein structure which is similar to our unknown structure from which the diffraction data is de ...

phasing from known homologous structures. Brunger's research group currently studies the molecular mechanism of

synaptic vesicle In a neuron, synaptic vesicles (or neurotransmitter vesicles) store various neurotransmitters that are released at the synapse. The release is regulated by a voltage-dependent calcium channel. Vesicles are essential for propagating nerve impu ...

fusion in

neurotransmission Neurotransmission (Latin: ''transmissio'' "passage, crossing" from ''transmittere'' "send, let through") is the process by which signaling molecules called neurotransmitters are released by the axon terminal of a neuron (the presynaptic neuron), ...

References

External links

Biography of Axel T. Brunger

Profile of Axel T. Brunger

PNAS Inaugural Profile

Website of Axel T. Brunger
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brunger, Axel T. 1956 births 21st-century American physicists University of Hamburg alumni Technical University of Munich alumni German emigrants to the United States Harvard University staff Yale Department of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry faculty Living people Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Crystallographers Stanford University School of Medicine faculty Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences