Jacques Monod

Jacques Lucien Monod (French: [mɔno]; 9 February 1910 – 31 May 1976) was a French biochemist. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis"

Monod and Jacob became famous for their work on the E. coli lac operon, which encodes proteins necessary for the transport and breakdown of the sugar lactose (lac). From their own work and the work of others, they came up with a model for how the levels of some proteins in a cell are controlled. In their model, the manufacture of a set of related proteins, such as the ones encoded within the lac (lactose) operon, is prevented when a repressor protein, encoded by a regulatory gene, binds to its operator, a specific site in the DNA sequence that is close to the genes encoding the proteins. (It is now known that a repressor bound to an operator physically blocks RNA polymerase from binding to the promoter, the site where transcription of the adjacent genes begins.)

Study of the control of expression of genes in the lac operon provided the first example of a system for the regulation of transcription. Monod also suggested the existence of messenger RNA molecules that link the information encoded in DNA and proteins. For these contributions he is widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology.

As a student at the University of Paris, Monod discovered that the coursework was decades behind the current biological science. He learned from other students a little older than himself, rather than from the faculty. "To George Teissier he owes a preference for quantitative descriptions; André Lwoff initiated him into the potentials of microbiology; to Boris Ephrussi he owes the discovery of physiological genetics, and to Louis Rapkine the concept that only chemical and molecular descriptions could provide a complete interpretation of the function of living organisms."

Before his doctoral work, Monod spent a year in the laboratory of Thomas Hunt Morgan at the California Institute of Technology working on Drosophila genetics. This was a true revelation for him and probably influenced him on developing a genetic conception of biochemistry and metabolism.

Monod's interest in the lac operon originated from his doctoral dissertation, which explored the growth of bacteria on mixtures of sugars and documented the sequential utilization of two or more sugars. The work was conducted at the University of Paris, with André Lwoff of the Pasteur Institute having provided important advice. Monod coined the term diauxie to denote the frequent observations of two distinct growth phases of bacteria grown on two sugars. He theorized on the growth of bacterial cultures and promoted the chemostat theory as a powerful continuous culture system to investigate bacterial physiology.

Monod joined the Pasteur Institute in 1943 and Jacob in 1949. The experimental system ultimately used by Jacob and Monod was a common bacterium, E. coli, but the basic regulatory concept (described in the Lac operon article) that was discovered by Jacob and Monod is fundamental to cellular regulation for all organisms. The key idea is that E. coli does not waste energy making such enzymes if there is no need to metabolize lactose, such as when other sugars like glucose are available. The type of regulation is called negative gene regulation, as the operon is inactivated by a protein complex that is removed in the presence of lactose (regulatory induction).

With Jean-Pierre Changeux and François Jacob, Monod proposed a theory of allosteric transitions to explain how conformational effects could allow enzyme effectors that are structurally quite different from the enzyme's substrates and products to activate or inhibit the reaction: binding at an allosteric site of the enzyme remote from the active site could bring about a change at the active site. He made an important contribution to enzymology when he collaborated with Jeffries Wyman and Changeux to extend this concept to explain cooperative behaviour of some multi-subunit proteins. This has become the most widely accepted explanation of cooperativity.