Manuel Francisco Morales (July 23, 1919 – November 12, 2009) was a Honduran-born American biophysicist who did pivotal research on the molecular basis of muscle contraction.
In the 1950s at the Naval Medical Research Institute, Morales and Terrell Hill showed that the high energy of the terminal phosphate bond in ATP was due to electrostatic repulsion between the three phosphate groups,[1][2] and he and Richard Podolsky measured the heat of hydrolysis for ATP cleavage, the fundamental energy currency of biological metabolism.[1][3]
Botts J, Morales MF (1953) Analytical description of the effects of modifiers and of enzyme multivalency upon the steady state catalyzed reaction rate, Trans. Faraday Soc., 49(6), 696–6707 (doi:10.1039/tf9534900696)
Podolsky RJ, Morales MF. (1956) The Enthalpy Change of Adenosine Triphosphate Hydrolysis Journal of Biological Chemistry 218: 945–959 (pdf)
Mendelson RA, Morales MF, Botts J. (1973) Segmental flexibility of the S-1 moiety of myosin. Biochemistry 12: 2250–2255 (doi:10.1021/bi00736a011)
Botts J, Takashi R, Torgerson P, Hozumi T, Muhlrad A, D Mornet D, Morales MF. (1984) On the mechanism of energy transduction in myosin subfragment 1. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 81: 2060–2064