group in Australia. These drugs also lead to increased bradykinin levels, a hormone that decreases blood pressure and protects against heart disease.
9. Three dimensional structure of human Chorionic Gonadotropin hCG - 1994
Dr Neil Isaacs, together with Professor Frank Morgan, a former Director of SVI, and their groups determined the three-dimensional structure of human chorionic gonadotropin in 1994. This hormone is made by the embryo soon after conception and later made by the placenta. The hormone plays an essential role in the early stages of pregnancy. Early pregnancy testing is often based on detecting hCG in urine or blood. Knowledge of the structure of hCG has helped in the understanding of the structure and function of a number of other hormones essential for reproduction that are related to hCG.
10. Role of PTHrP in foetal development – 1988
When Professor Jack Martin and his team discovered PTHrP it was thought that it was present in the circulation only in cancer, where its excess causes complications. The research team
then discovered that it also circulates in the blood of the foetus during pregnancy and promotes the transfer of calcium from mother to foetus to
provide calcium for the foetal skeleton.
11. Role of PTHrP in breast cancer - 1988
Professor Jack Martin and his research group were interested in discovering why patients with certain cancers so commonly
developed a high blood calcium level, causing nausea, vomiting,
dehydration and often ending in coma. They discovered parathyroid
hormone-related protein (PTHrP) in the 1980s and went on to purify, clone and synthesise it. They showed that PTHrP is the cause of high blood calcium levels in most patients and also that PTHrP produced by certain cancers, especially of the breast, helps those cancers to establish as secondary growths in bone.
12. The Sequenator – 1967 (Australia’s second most highly cited paper)
Proteins are the essential building blocks of the body and all diseases involve a change in protein behaviour. Knowledge of a protein’s structure enables the development of ways to block or promote its action in the prevention or treatment of disease. SVI’s first Director, Pehr Edman was a pioneer in the study of protein structure and developed a set of reactions that could be used to identify all the amino acids found on a protein.
His work began to be recognised internationally but the manual, test tube method he used could only determine 10 amino acids at the rate of one per day. Edman and one of SVI’s staff members, Geoff Begg, recognised the enormous potential of automation and together, hand-built a machine to carry out the process. Known as the Sequenator, the machine could determine the sequence of 60 amino acids at the rate of one amino acid per hour. This enabled structurally based functional studies to be carried out on biologically important proteins in many areas from haematology and immunology to endocrinology.
American instrument makers Beckman marketed a commercial version of the sequanator based on Edman's design, called the Sequencer, which became widely used in laboratories throughout the world. Use of this machine and Edman's method of determining amino acid structure dominated the field of structural biochemistry until the 1990s when it was replaced by mass spectrometry and DNA sequencing.