CELL: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONS Chapter Cell: The Unit of Life Chapter Biomolecules Chapter Cell Cycle and Cell Division G.N. R AMACHANDRAN , an outstanding figure in the field of protein structure, was the founder of the ‘Madras school’ of conformational analysis of biopolymers. His discovery of the triple helical structure of collagen published in Nature in and his analysis of the allowed conformations of proteins through the use of the ‘Ramachandran plot’ rank among the most outstanding contributions in structural biology. He was born on October , , in a small town, not far from Cochin on the southwestern coast of India.
His father was a professor of mathematics at a local college and thus had considerable influence in shaping Ramachandran’s interest in mathematics. After completing his school years, Ramachandran graduated in as the top- ranking student in the B.Sc. (Honors) Physics course of the University of Madras. He received a Ph.D.
from Cambridge University in . While at Cambridge, Ramachandran met Linus Pauling and was deeply influenced by his publications on models of the α -helix and β -sheet structures that directed his attention to solving the structure of collagen. He passed away at the age of , on April , . G.N.
Ramachandran ( – ) When you look around, you see both living and non-living things. You must have wondered and asked yourself – ‘what is it that makes an organism living, or what is it that an inanimate thing does not have which a living thing has’ ? The answer to this is the presence of the basic unit of life – the cell in all living organisms. All organisms are composed of cells.
Some are composed of a single cell and are called unicellular organisms while others, like us, composed of many cells, are called multicellular organisms.