Dr. Nikos G. Oikonomakos (1945-2008)
Dr. Nikos G. Oikonomakos, was a structural biologist, Director of IOPC, and the head of SBCG. Dr. Oikonomakos, obtained a Diploma in Chemistry (1970), and a Doctorate in Chemistry (1977), University of Athens, Greece. His achievements in the structural and functional characterisation of key enzymes of glycogen metabolism are well documented in many international university textbooks. Moreover, his research achievements have been crucial in defining the present state of the art in this research topic. The elucidation of the catalytic mechanisms of glycogen phosphorylase and phosphorylase kinase is well documented in e.g. Donald Voet & Judith G. Voet Biochemistry (1995) 2nd ed, John Wiley & Sons, Inc, New York, Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry (1996), Nicholas C. Price & Lewis Stevens Fundamentals of Enzymology, 3rd ed, Oxford Univ. Press (1999), Alan Fersht Structure and Mechanism in Protein Science, A Guide to Enzyme Catalysis and Protein Folding, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York (1999), David E. Metzler’s Biochemistry, The Chemical Reactions of Living Cells, 2nd ed, Vol.1, Academic Press (2001), Jeremy M. Berg, John L. Tymoczko & Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry, 5th ed., W.H. Freeman and Company, New York (2002), where the present state of the art is traced back to his achievements together with Prof. Dame L. N. Johnson’s group (Univ. of Oxford, Oxford, UK). He was a Registered user (since 1983) of the European Synchrotron Radiation Sources for X-ray crystallographic data collection of the Synchrotron Radiation Source, Daresbury Laboratory, Daresbury, UK, Sinchrotrone Trieste, Trieste, Italy, EMBL, Hamburg-Outstation, DESY, and ESRF, Grenoble, France, through grant applications. He has also supervised 9 PhD Theses, 4 MSc, and 24 final year projects. His research focused on structural aspects of a number of diverse biological issues, including the cell cycle, signal transduction pathways, enzyme mechanisms, proteins of the inflammatory response for the purpose of structure-based drug design. He worked for more than 25 years in the field of structural biology. This is reflected by numerous publications in high-impact research journals and more than 150 novel structures, protein variants and ligand complexes he has deposited with RCSB Protein Data Bank.
For all of us Nikos was a dear friend, a passionate researcher and an innovative
teacher. We will all miss him .