The van Deenen Medal

In honor of Laurens L.M. van Deenen, pioneer in biomembrane research at Utrecht University, the Institute of Biomembranes will annually award The van Deenen Medal to a leading scientist in biomembrane research.

During the annual Institute of Biomembranes (IB) Conference on Biomembranes, 30 October 2009 in Utrecht, Gunnar von Heijne received the 2009 van Deenen Medal for his outstanding contributions to the field of biomembrane research.

Gunnar is an enthusiastic and creative scientist whose research focuses on membrane proteins. In particular, he aims to understand how these proteins are targeted to particular membranes, how they become inserted and what determines their topology. His approach is unique, in that he combines the power of bioinformatics with cleverly designed in vitro molecular biological approaches. This allows him to compare processes that occur in biological membranes upon biosynthetic insertion of membrane proteins with results from biophysical approaches and bioinformatics. Gunnar is particularly well known for his contributions to bioinformatics, which have had a large impact in the field of biomembranes: he designed many new algorithms, that are now widely used, with probably most well-known the so-called ‘positive-inside’ rule, which allows one to predict the topology of membrane proteins simply by counting charges on either side of the membrane-spanning fragments. Gunnar's research has resulted in a long list of highly-cited papers in top journals like Science and Nature. He has also made name as an inspiring teacher.

The IB conference was preceded by the IB PhD student day, during which the speakers of the conference supervised a number of well-attended workshops for PhD students and postdocs. Both days are part of the PhD program Biomembranes of the Graduate School of Life Sciences of Utrecht University. They were fully booked and attracted many PhD students, postdocs and staff scientists, but also master students, from Utrecht as well as other institutes in the Netherlands. During the IB PhD day, Coen Maas from the Department of Clinical Chemistry and Haematology, UMC Utrecht, received the IB publication award for his paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation 118 (2008) 3208-18.

Van Deenen medallist 2009 Gunnar von Heijne has received the van Deenen
medal from Prof. Judith klumperman.

During the annual symposium of the Institute of Biomembranes (IB), 24 October in Utrecht, Ari Helenius has received the 2008 van Deenen Medal for his outstanding career in biomembrane research.

Central to all of Ari Helenius' work (since 1977) are membranes and membrane proteins. A cell biologist at heart he studied the functioning and dynamics of eukaryotic membranes and organelles, typically using viruses and their components as probes. Over the years he touched many different topics, always researching issues in great depth but never hesitating to move on to novel questions. He was generous towards every senior post-doc in his laboratory, always allowing them to take their project to an independent position. This never led to competition as Helenius simply moved on to another topic. And when he did, he opened new books in every research field he touched. It started with his work as a PhD student, in which he wrote a citation classic: Ari Helenius and Kai Simons were the first to apply detergents to the study of membrane proteins. We cannot fathom where cell biology and biochemistry would stand today without detergents as these are the tools that were instrumental to the tremendous progress made over the last decades.

Ari Helenius became famous in 1980 when he described the first endocytic cell entry pathway of a virus, including the acid-activated fusion of an enveloped virus. Over the years he used altogether 12 different viruses to study issues as different as membrane traffic, nuclear import and export, nucleocapsid uncoating and caveolar endocytosis. Most of his virological work centers around the variety of ways by which viruses gain access to cells, how they exploit and subvert cellular organelles and pathways, and take control. Doing so, he established novel concepts in virology by applying cell biology to virology, and vice versa.

Van Deenen medallist 2008 Ari Helenius has received the van Deenen
medal from the scientific director of the IB, Gerrit van Meer.

For ~15 years he contributed significantly to the field of protein folding in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), studying the folding process of viral glycoproteins. Helenius discovered that the resident ER proteins calnexin and calreticulin are major chaperones for glycoproteins. He identified the components of the quality control cycle for folding glycoproteins, characterized them and essentially proved every step of the model that arose from the first experiments. The model and its evidence established a new concept for the recognition and retention of not yet properly folded proteins in the ER.

Ari Helenius has published more than 200 papers and altogether his work has been cited more than 23,000 times. His papers are characterized by a great elegance in experimental design, a rigor in thoroughness and solidity, and by the careful interpretations. Helenius' discussions and reviews show a wealth of insight in published literature and original ideas. Surely, additional novel and important discoveries can be expected from his laboratory over the years to come.

During the annual symposium of the Institute of Biomembranes (IB), 19 October in Utrecht, Randy Schekman received the 2007 van Deenen Medal for his outstanding career in biomembrane research. The Schekman lab studies membrane assembly, vesicular transport, and membrane fusion among organelles of the secretory pathway. By a combination of genetic, morphological and biochemical evaluations of the secretion (sec) mutants in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the Schekman lab has elucidated key components and events of the secretory pathway and made a tremendous contribution to our understanding of the principal mechanisms involved in membrane transport and protein sorting. Importantly, protein transport in yeast appears to be mediated by the same organelles and proteins that operate in mammalian cells.

Gerrit van Meer presents The van Deenen Medal to Randy Schekman during
the annual symposium of the Institute of Biomembranes (IB), 19 October 2007 in Utrecht.

The impact of the outstanding contributions of Dr. Schekman to modern cell biology is internationally recognized and perhaps best illustrated by the numerous prestigious awards that were previously awarded to him. Among his honors are the Eli Lilly Award in microbiology, the Lewis S. Rosenstiel Award in basic biomedical science, the Gairdner International Award, the Amgen Award from the Protein Society, the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, and the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize of Columbia University. Moreover, Dr. Schekman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, scientific director of the Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund for Medical Research, past president of the American Society for Cell Biology and member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is editor in chief of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.

During the IB Conference on Biomembranes 2006, Prof. Dr. Chris R.H. Raetz received the van Deenen Medal for his outstanding achievements on research on bacterial lipids. Chris Raetz received his PhD at Harvard University in Boston were he worked with Eugene Kenedy to study the biosynthesis of bacterial phospholipids. He subsequently shifted to the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharides (LPS), a much more complex bacterial lipid species. LPS is also known as endotoxin and is responsible for very strong immunological reactions in patients that suffer from bacterial infections. He was then already working at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, USA, were his group unraveled the complete biosynthesis route for LPS, a route one should now call the “Raetz pathway”. This opened the possibility for the development of new antimicrobial drugs that block LPS synthesis. As research director at Merck Research Laboratories at Rahway, New Jersey, Raetz persued these possibilities for several years but moved back to the academia. He recieved a chair at Duke University, Durham were he continued his research on LPS, focussing both on the development of LPS-synthesis inhibitors as well as the LPS modifications that exist in many different bacteria.

On a well-attended Annual Symposium of the Institute for Biomembranes (November 11) Kai Simons received the 2005 van Deenen medal for his impressive career in biomembrane research. After his medical training and a stay as research associate at Rockefeller (New York), Kai started his important research on membrane viruses with Ari Helenius at the end of the sixties. This resulted in the discovery of the pH dependent virus fusion in 1980 at the EMBL Heidelberg, where he had since 1975 created a blooming cell biology program.
He then directed his attention to the molecular basis of the polarity of the epithelial cell surface. After formulating with Gerrit van Meer the lipid raft hypothesis, which states that membranes contain domains of a different lipid composition, he has played a leading role in the field.
Since 2000 he started a new Max-Planck-Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, which already now belongs to the top institutes in Europe. Kai's last message to the audience was that after a period of fluorescence, genomics and proteomics, we need thorough biochemical research emphasizing the molecular analysis of cell biological processes and the reconstitution of these processes from purified components in vitro.

Arie Verkleij (Cell Biology, Biology, UU) has been Scientific Director since the inauguration of the IB in 1991. He is initiator and founder of the Research School of Biomembranes. For his great efforts for the Institute of Biomembranes Arie Verkleij was awarded The van Deenen Medal for special services, made of aluminum. As of November 2004, Arie Verkleij was succeeded by Gerrit van Meer (Membrane Enzymology, Chemistry, UU).

Arie Verkleij presents The van Deenen Medal to the audience during
the IB conference on Biomembranes in October 22, 2004.

Michael Sheetz published in 1974 the standard model for biomembranes.
Biological Membranes as Bilayer Couples. A Molecular Mechanism of Drug-Erythrocyte Interactions Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1974 November; 71(11): 4457–4461 Michael P. Sheetz and S. J. Singer. With advanced techniques, like the laser-tweezer technique, he and his colleagues demonstrated later the existence of important interactions between biomembranes and the cytoskeleton.

Arie Verkleij presents the award winner Michael Sheetz the first
van Deenen Medal during the IB conference on Biomembranes October 22, 2004.