Lipmann, Fritz Albert(1899–1986) GermanBio-
chemist Fritz Albert Lipmann was born on June 12,
1899, in Koenigsberg, Germany, to Leopold Lipmann
and his wife Gertrud Lachmanski.
Between 1917 and 1922 he was educated at the
Universities of Koenigsberg, Berlin, and Munich, where
hestudied medicine and received an M.D. degree in
1924 at Berlin. In 1926 he was an assistant in Otto
MEYERHOF’s laboratory at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute,
Berlin, and received a Ph.D. in 1927. He then went
with Meyerhof to Heidelberg to conduct research on
the biochemical reactions occurring in muscle.
In 1930 Lipmann went back to the Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute in Berlin and then to a new institute in
Copenhagen in 1932. Between 1931 and 1932 he
served as a Rockefeller fellow at the Rockefeller Insti-
tute in New York and identified serine phosphate as
the constituent of phosphoproteins that contains the
phosphate.
He went to Copenhagen in 1932 as a research
associate in the Biological Institute of the Carlsberg
Foundation. In 1939 he came to America and became
research associate in the department of biochemistry at
Cornell Medical School, New York, and in 1941
joined the research staff of the Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston, first as a research associate in the
department of surgery, then heading his own group in
the Biochemical Research Laboratory of the hospital.
In 1944 he became an American citizen. In 1949 he
became professor of biological chemistry at Harvard
Medical School, Boston. In 1957 he was appointed a
member and professor of the Rockefeller Institute,
New York.
In 1947 he isolated and named coenzyme A (or
CoA). He later determined the molecular structure
(1953) of this factor that is now known to be bound to
acetic acid as the end product of sugar and fat break-
down in the absence of oxygen. It is one of the most
important substances involved in cellular metabolism,
since it helps in converting amino acids, steroids, fatty
acids, and hemoglobins into energy. For his discovery
of this coenzyme he was awarded the 1953 Nobel Prize
in physiology or medicine. He died on July 24, 1986, in
Poughkeepsie, New York.
lipophilicity Represents the AFFINITY of a molecule
or a moiety (portion of a molecular structure) for a
lipophilic (fat soluble) environment. It is commonly
measured by its distribution behavior in a biphasic sys-
tem, either liquid-liquid (e.g., partition coefficient in
octan-1-ol/water) or solid-liquid (retention on reversed-
phase high-performance liquid chromatography (RP-
HPLC) or thin-layer chromatography (TLC) system).
See alsoHYDROPHOBICITY.lipoprotein Since lipids are hydrophobic (water
insoluble), certain lipids like cholesterol and triglyc-
erides are coated or bonded with a protein so they can
becarried in the blood. Since it is not possible to deter-
mine the exact lipoprotein content in blood due to the
variety of lipoproteins, the medical profession talks
about low-density lipoproteins (LDLs) and high-density
lipoproteins (HDLs) that transport fats and cholesterol
through the blood.lipoxygenase A nonheme iron ENZYME that cat-
alyzes the INSERTIONof O 2 into polyunsaturated fatty
acids to form hydroperoxy derivatives.lithosphere The solid inorganic uppermost portion
ormantle of the Earth that includes the surface land
and that of the ocean basin and is about 60 miles thick.littoral zone The shallow shoreward region of a
freshwater body, just beyond the breaker zone, and
where light penetrates to the bottom sediments, giv-
ing rise to a zone that is colonized by rooted plants
called helophytes; a region of a lake or pond where
the water is less than 6 meters deep; in oceanography,
the line extending from the high water line to about
200 meters; also called the intertidal zone where sub-
mersion of tides is a normal event. The near-surface
open water surrounded by the littoral zone is the lim-
netic zone, which gets ample light and is dominated
by plankton. The littoral system is divided into a
eulittoral (lower, middle, and upper) and a sublittoral
(or subtidal, or supratidal) zone, the zone exposed to
air only at its upper limit by the lowest spring tides.
They are separated at a depth of about 50 meters.
The term is also frequently used interchangeably with
intertidal zone.littoral zone 207