 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.