Cori

Austro-Hungarian-born US biochemists who were awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine in 1947 for their work on the production and breakdown of glycogen – a derivative of glucose – for use as a store and source of energy. They shared the prize with Argentine physiologist Bernardo Houssay.

Both were born in Prague and married while studying at the medical school there. They emigrated to the USA in 1922, and in 1931 Carl Cori was appointed professor of biochemistry at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, Missouri. Gerty Cori also worked there, becoming professor in 1947. Carl Cori remained at St Louis until 1967, when he moved to Harvard Medical School.

Glycogen is broken down in the muscles into lactic acid, which, when the muscles rest, is reconverted to glycogen. In the 1930s the Coris set out to determine exactly how these changes take place. Gerty Cori found a new substance in muscle tissue, glucose-1-phosphate, now known as Cori ester. Its formation from glycogen involves only a small amount of energy change, so that the balance between the two substances can easily be shifted in either direction. The second step in the reaction chain involves the conversion of glucose-1-phosphate into glucose-6-phosphate. Finally this second phosphate is changed to fructose-1,6-diphosphate, which is eventually converted to lactic acid. The first set of reactions from glycogen to glucose-6-phosphate is now termed glycogenolysis; the second set, from glucose-6-phosphate to lactic acid, is referred to as glycolysis.