Peter Walter (born December 5, 1954) is a German-American molecular biologist and

biochemist Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. They study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. Biochemists study DNA, proteins and cell parts. The word "biochemist" is a portmanteau of "biological che ...

and is Director of the Bay Area Institute of Science at Altos Labs, Professor at the

University of California, San Francisco The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is a public land-grant research university in San Francisco, California. It is part of the University of California system and is dedicated entirely to health science and life science. It co ...

(UCSF). He was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator until 2022.

Education

Peter attended the Freie Universität Berlin, received his MS in Organic Chemistry from

Vanderbilt University Vanderbilt University (informally Vandy or VU) is a private research university in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded in 1873, it was named in honor of shipping and rail magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, who provided the school its initial $1-million ...

in 1977 and his PhD in Cell Biology at The Rockefeller University in 1981.

Career

During his thesis work in Dr. Günter Blobel's laboratory, Walter purified the proteinaceous members of a macromolecular complex essential for protein translocation into the

endoplasmic reticulum The endoplasmic reticulum (ER) is, in essence, the transportation system of the eukaryotic cell, and has many other important functions such as protein folding. It is a type of organelle made up of two subunits – rough endoplasmic reticulum ( ...

(ER) and showed that it selectively recognizes nascent secretory proteins in the cytoplasm of eukaryotic cells and targets them to the ER. He subsequently identified a 7S RNA component of the complex which is essential for its function and named the holocomplex the

signal recognition particle The signal recognition particle (SRP) is an abundant, cytosolic, universally conserved ribonucleoprotein (protein-RNA complex) that recognizes and targets specific proteins to the endoplasmic reticulum in eukaryotes and the plasma membra ...

(SRP). Walter moved from Rockefeller to start his own laboratory at the University of California, San Fr