Gopalasamudram Narayana Iyer Ramachandran
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Gopalasamudram Narayana Iyer Ramachandran (8 October 1922 - 7 April 2001), is widely acknowledged as one of the most important Indian scientists of the 20th century, best known for work done by a graduate student under his suprivision [citation needed] that led to the creation of the Ramachandran Map for understanding peptide structure. He also made other major contributions in biology and physics.
Ramachandran was born in the town of Ernakulam, Kerala, India. In 1942 he received a master's degree in physics from Madras University and later received a D.Sc. from the same university. Here he mostly studied crystal physics and crystal optics. During his studies he created an X-ray focusing mirror for the X-ray microscope. The resulting field of crystal topography is used extensively in studies involving crystal growth and solid-state reactivity.
Ramachandran then spent two years (1947-1949) at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, where he earned his Ph.D. for studies on X-ray diffuse scattering and its application to determination of elastic constants'.
When he moved back to Madras University in 1952 he continued his work on crystal physics, but his interest shifted to the structure of biological macromolecules. Using X-ray diffraction Ramachandran along with Gopinath Kartha proposed and published the triple helical structure of collagen in 1954.
Wanting to tackle problems at a more fundamental level, Ramachandran decided to use this information to examine the various polypeptide conformations then known and also to develop a good 'yardstick' that could be used for examining and assessing any structure in general, but peptides in particular. The result which emerged from these calculations in 1962, - now commonly known as the Ramachandran Map - was published in the Journal of Molecular Biology in 1963 and has become an essential tool in the field of protein conformation. When it was first calculated, crystal structures had barely been obtained for any protein. From the mid 1960s onward Ramachandran studied many topics relating to the conformation of peptides including types of ß-turns, conformation of prolyl residues, cis-peptide units, occurrence and need for non-planarity of the peptides, NMR coupling constants, peptides containing L and D residues and many others.
Ramachandran can be credited for bringing together into the one field of molecular biophysics the then disparate fields of X-ray crystallography, peptide synthesis, NMR and other optical studies, and physico-chemical experimentation.
In 1970 he founded the Molecular Biophysics Unit at the Indian Institute of Science which was later known as the Centre of Advanced Study in Biophysics and Crystallography.
Notable awards that Ramachandran received include the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for Physics in India and the Fellowship of the Royal Society of London. In 1999 the International Union of Crystallography honored him with the Ewald Prize for his 'outstanding contributions to crystallography'.
During the last few years of his life he suffered a stroke and was affected by Parkinsonism. Ramachandran died in 2001 at the age of 78.
