Éric Westhof is a French biochemist born in Uccle (Belgium) on July 25, 1948. He is a member of the Academie des sciences, head of Education and Training (DEF) and a member of the Board of Directors of the "La Main à la pâte" Foundation. He is professor emeritus of structural biochemistry at the University of Strasbourg at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology.
Biography
After obtaining a bachelor's degree in physical sciences from the University of Liège, he carried out research work at the Regensburg Universität (Germany) on a EURATOM grant with a view to obtaining a doctorate from the University of Liège in 1974. He then became a research associate (on a Fulbright-Hays fellowship) at the University of Wisconsin until 1977 in Professor M. Sundaralingam's laboratory. Thanks to an EMBO grant, he then established himself in 1981 at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (IBMC-CRNS), affiliated with the Université Louis Pasteur (ULP-Strasbourg) in France. In 1984, he obtained a position as a research fellow (CR1) and has been a professor of structural biochemistry since 1988. From 2005 to 2016, he was director of the CNRS Research Unit "Architecture and Reactivity of RNA" at the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (IBMC), where he was director from 2006 to 2016. From 2003 to 2007 he was chairman of the Research Commission of the Faculty of Life Sciences of Louis Pasteur University, where he was an elected member of the Scientific Council from 2002-2006. He was then elected vice president research and doctoral training (2007-2008). Together with Alain Beretz, he is involved in the merger of the three Strasbourg universities and becomes vice-president research and doctoral training at the University of Strasbourg between 2009 and 2012.
Eric Westhof is executive editor of RNA journal (CSHP), Nucleic Acids Research (OUP), and the Journal of Molecular Recognition (Wiley).
Research area
His research area concerns the structural biology of nucleic acids (stereochemistry, topology, modelling and bioinformatics) and especially ribonucleic acid molecules (RNA). He has developed computer tools dedicated to crystallographic refinement and computer manipulation of nucleic acids. These have led to excellent three-dimensional RNA structures. For more than a decade, these tools have been used by nucleic acid crystallographers in many countries. At a time when only the structure of the transfer RNA was known, he and François Michel proposed a three-dimensional model of the structure of the core of group I autocatalytic introns. Ten years later, crystallography confirms the architecture of the model, thus offering a vast field of new applications in structural biology. Folding of other ribozymes (hepatitis delta virus, ribonuclease P, hairpin ribozyme) has also been proposed. Several years after these publications, independent crystal structures have shown the accuracy of the architecture of the folds and interactions responsible for self-assembly. His expertise in RNA structure modeling has led him to collaborate with several groups. Thus, with F. Eckstein and T. Tuschl, the first model of the hammer-headed ribozyme was produced on the basis of fluorescence data. With Dr. Kochoyan, the first models of RNA aptamers modelled from nuclear magnetic resonance data were presented. With W. Filipowicz and F. Kolb, a DICER double-stranded RNA binding and cleavage model explaining the maturation of microRNAs has been published.
Analysis of crystallographic structures and comparisons with theoretical models then made it possible to establish predictive rules for RNA folding. With Neocles Leontis, Eric Westhof proposed an ontology of pairs between nucleic acid bases that allows automatic annotation of crystal structures and bioinformatic research of structured regions in RNA sequences; This structural bioinformatics work by the RNA has made it possible to identify a set of constraints in sequence allowing architectural models of RNA. This set of rules and constraints, which can be read from sequence alignments and manipulated by computer, allows them to deduce RNA architectures, which is essential for our understanding of the function and structural evolution of RNAs.