Aaron Klug (spelled Kloog) is a biochemist famous by his investigations on the three-dimensional structure of some viruses and chromatin.

Aaron Klug was born in Zelvas (Lituània) on 1926. When he was two years old, his family emigrated to South Africa and there he grew and studied. Klug began studying Medicine, but he graduated with a Science degree and began to study the structure of simple organic molecules by X-ray difraction. In 1949 he went to Cambridge (England) and integrated in the group, directed by Rosalind Franklin, that elucidated the structure of tobacco mosaic virus. Later Klug participated in the determination of the three-dimensional structure of some spherical viruses, RNAt, a ribozyme, nucleosomes and the zinc-finger domain.

In order to study the three-dimensional structure of these macromolecules and aggregates of macromolecules, Klug developed the crystallographic electron microscopy. This technique reconstructs the three-dimensional structure of the studied object from two-dimensionals pictures of crystals, made with electron microscopy and obtained from different angles.

In 1982, Aaron Klug won the Chemistry Nobel prize. In 1995 he was elected president of the Royal Society.

More information:

• Nobel e-Museum.
• Timeline of Nobel Winners.
• MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Cambridge.