(1943–    ), German biophysicist and Nobel laureate. Born in Zusamaltheim, Bavaria, he was educated at the Technical University of Munich, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1974. Deisenhofer joined the Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry in Martinsried, near Munich, in 1972 as a student, returned as a postdoctoral fellow, and worked as a staff scientist from 1976 to 1988 when he went to the U.S. to become a professor at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the Southwestern Medical Center of the University of Texas at Dallas.

Deisenhofer concentrated on the use of X-ray crystallography to investigate biological macromolecules, participating in projects involving crystallographic refinements of the structure of bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor, the human myeloma protein Kol, and protein A from the Staphylococcus aureus. He collaborated with the German chemists Robert Huber and Hartmut Michel in the investigation of the role of membrane-bound proteins in PHOTOSYNTHESIS, (q.v.) in bacteria. By applying X-ray crystallographic techniques to the analysis of such a protein that was taken from the purple bacterium, Rhodopseudomonas viridis, Deisenhofer and Michel succeeded in elucidating the protein's three-dimensional structure.

Deisenhofer, Michel, and Huber shared the 1988 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the revelation of “the three-dimensional structure of closely linked proteins that are essential to photosynthesis.”

See also PROTEIN,; Research..