My brother Martin Low, who has died aged 63 after suffering from Alzheimer's disease, was a pioneering biochemist whose seminal work helped to uncover a new and unexpected organising principle of how cells work.
He grew up in Southport, Lancashire. From around the age of 12, he regularly attended the local scientific society. With me and our other brother, Peter, he participated in often dramatic chemistry experiments from a makeshift laboratory in the conservatory of the family home, which also fostered his early interest in practical scientific exploration.
The central theme of Martin's work, starting from his PhD studies with Bryan Finean at Birmingham University (following a degree in biochemistry at Newcastle University), was the description of a previously undiscovered way in which proteins are attached to the surfaces of eukaryotic (nucleated) cells.
In 1977, Martin moved to the US for postdoctoral work at Cornell University and, subsequently, at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation. Here he continued, with several collaborators in Israel and New York, to decipher the chemical details of this phenomenon. He became a professor in the department of physiology and cellular biophysics at Columbia University, New York in 1987.
Throughout the 1980s he published a large number of widely quoted papers in leading journals, a groundbreaking body of work that led directly to the description of a new class of attachment for membrane proteins – the glycosylphosphatidylinositol (GPI) anchor. So many laboratories have contributed since that there is now very detailed information available on how the many proteins of this type, which Martin and then others investigated, are assembled and put on to the cell surface. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1996 in recognition of his contribution to the field.
"Martin was everything a scientist should be – curious, critical and creative," said his former collaborator Prof Israel Silman, of the Weizmann Institute, Israel. "It was a pleasure to work with him." Jahar Bhattacharya, a colleague at Columbia, found him to be "gentle, kind and delightfully witty. His personal modesty belied the extraordinary scientific advances that he had achieved in the relatively short time available to him."
A devoted family man, Martin had a sunny disposition and an infectious sense of humour. He was a lifelong devotee of fell walking and returned often to England with his wife, Eileen, and their sons, Alan and Jeremy, for holidays in the Lake District. They all survive him.