Talk:EIF4E

eif4e discovery

Witold Filipowicz started to collaborate with the laboratory of Aaron Shatkin in early fall of 1974, after moving to the RIMB together with his postdoctoral adviser, the Nobel Laureate Severo Ochoa, from New York University Medical School. While continuing to work with Dr. Ochoa on translation factors and development of the brine shrimp Artemia salina, Witold Filipowicz became excited by the groundbreaking discoveries in the neighboring laboratory and started to investigate the role of capping with Aaron Shatkin’s group. Together with Hiro, they identified and partially purified from high-salt washes of A. salina ribosomes, a protein activity which specifically bound the m7G cap in mRNA. None of the tested known translation initiation factors purified from rabbit reticulocytes showed similar cap binding properties, indicating that this function had to be performed by an unknown factor. The mystery was solved by Nahum Sonenberg, who arrived in Aaron Shatkin’s laboratory in 1976 from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel. Nahum was warmly welcomed by Hiro and greatly benefited from his extensive knowledge and insightful ideas. He exploited the chemistry of the cap structure, specifically the availability of the free cis-diol of the cap m7G ribose moiety, to develop an mRNA–protein cross-linking approach (with the help of Charles Cantor at Columbia who advised ~2026-36924-90 (talk) 18:00, 27 June 2026 (UTC)