Animesh Ray is a professor of computational and molecular biology at Keck Graduate Institute.
Animesh Ray was born in a suburb of Calcutta (now Kolkata), which used to be a French colony in India, to parents both of whom had their ancestral homes in East Bengal (now Bangladesh). He studied in a Bengali medium high school, and then at Presidency College (now Presidency University). After his undergraduate studies, he went to Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, to obtain a Master of Science in the new School of Life Sciences. He obtained his Ph.D. in microbial genetics from Monash University. From 1984 to 1988 he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Institute of Molecular Biology at the University of Oregon, Eugene, USA, in the laboratory of Professor Franklin W. Stahl. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1989 to 1991, in the laboratory of Professor Ethan Signer. From 1991 to 1995 he was an assistant professor at University of Rochester and then was its associate professor from 1996 to 2001. He joined Keck Graduate Institute as a professor in 2001. From 2001 to 2004 he was also an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego and during the same years was a visiting professor at the University of Rochester. In 2009 he became a visiting professor at Institute for Systems Biology and University of Hyderabad and currently works as director of Ph.D. programs at Keck Graduate Institute as well as the Center for Network Studies. Since 2009, he also has been an adjunct professor at the Center for Computational Sciences, San Diego State University, San Diego, and at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. [1]
Since 1985 Animesh Ray has studied the mechanisms of DNA recombination. In 1989 Animesh Ray published on mechanisms of homologous recombination induced by a DNA double-strand break using HIS3 gene of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and suggested that its chromosomes produce double chain break during DNA recombination. [2]
From 1995 to 2002, he conducted research on computing with DNA. In May 1997 he and Mitsunori Ogihara discovered DNA based computers can perform massively parallel computations. [3]
In June 1997 Animesh Ray suggested that gametophyte is responsible for pollen tube guidance but also mentioned that it might be indirectly accomplished. [4]
In 2002 he studied ovule of Arabidopsis thaliana and discovered a new type of gene regulation, involving post-transcriptional gene silencing, through a gene called DCL1 which is required for RNA silencing all multicellular organisms, including plants, in Drosophila and Caenorhabditis . [5]
In 2007 he and his students used Arabidopsis thaliana to track a footprint of broken DNA and suggested that the genes move from one locus to another. [6]
In 2011 he suggested that microRNA gene, miR-34b can be of use to diagnose melanoma. [7]
Animesh Ray has had numerous awards from the National Science Foundation since 1993, which include an over three million dollar research award in 2002 from the division of Computing and Communication Foundation (CCF), and a year 2005 award for over $4.8 million on a project within the Frontiers in Biological Research (FIBR) program of NSF. In 2009 Animesh Ray and Ali Nadim were awarded $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. [8] Dr. Animesh Ray was awarded the NIH Director's award for innovative research in 2021 .
Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a species of yeast. The species has been instrumental in winemaking, baking, and brewing since ancient times. It is believed to have been originally isolated from the skin of grapes. It is one of the most intensively studied eukaryotic model organisms in molecular and cell biology, much like Escherichia coli as the model bacterium. It is the microorganism behind the most common type of fermentation. S. cerevisiae cells are round to ovoid, 5–10 μm in diameter. It reproduces by budding.
Leland Harrison (Lee) Hartwell is former president and director of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. He shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Paul Nurse and Tim Hunt, for their discoveries of protein molecules that control the division (duplication) of cells.
In molecular biology and genetics, GC-content is the percentage of nitrogenous bases in a DNA or RNA molecule that are either guanine (G) or cytosine (C). This measure indicates the proportion of G and C bases out of an implied four total bases, also including adenine and thymine in DNA and adenine and uracil in RNA.
Franklin (Frank) William Stahl is an American molecular biologist and geneticist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for production of a new strand.
RNA polymerase 1 is, in higher eukaryotes, the polymerase that only transcribes ribosomal RNA, a type of RNA that accounts for over 50% of the total RNA synthesized in a cell.
Elliot Meyerowitz is an American biologist.
A Holliday junction is a branched nucleic acid structure that contains four double-stranded arms joined. These arms may adopt one of several conformations depending on buffer salt concentrations and the sequence of nucleobases closest to the junction. The structure is named after Robin Holliday, the molecular biologist who proposed its existence in 1964.
The MADS box is a conserved sequence motif. The genes which contain this motif are called the MADS-box gene family. The MADS box encodes the DNA-binding MADS domain. The MADS domain binds to DNA sequences of high similarity to the motif CC[A/T]6GG termed the CArG-box. MADS-domain proteins are generally transcription factors. The length of the MADS-box reported by various researchers varies somewhat, but typical lengths are in the range of 168 to 180 base pairs, i.e. the encoded MADS domain has a length of 56 to 60 amino acids. There is evidence that the MADS domain evolved from a sequence stretch of a type II topoisomerase in a common ancestor of all extant eukaryotes.
Detlef Weigel is a German American scientist working at the interface of developmental and evolutionary biology.
SRG1 RNA is a non-coding RNA which represses the expression of SER3 (YER081W). SER3 is a gene which codes for a phosphoglycerate dehydrogenase involved in the biosynthesis of serine. SRG1 represses SER3 expression via transcription interference, and in that respect is the first intergenic transcript of its kind.
Synthesis-dependent strand annealing (SDSA) is a major mechanism of homology-directed repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Although many of the features of SDSA were first suggested in 1976, the double-Holliday junction model proposed in 1983 was favored by many researchers. In 1994, studies of double-strand gap repair in Drosophila were found to be incompatible with the double-Holliday junction model, leading researchers to propose a model they called synthesis-dependent strand annealing. Subsequent studies of meiotic recombination in S. cerevisiae found that non-crossover products appear earlier than double-Holliday junctions or crossover products, challenging the previous notion that both crossover and non-crossover products are produced by double-Holliday junctions and leading the authors to propose that non-crossover products are generated through SDSA.
Leona D. Samson is the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor and American Cancer Society Research Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she served as the Director of the Center for Environmental Health Sciences from 2001 to 2012. Before her professorship at MIT, she held a professorship at the Harvard School of Public Health. She is on the editorial board of the journal DNA Repair. Her research interests focus on "methods for measuring DNA repair capacity (DRC) in human cells", research the National Institute of Health recognized as pioneering in her field, for which the NIH granted her the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.
Fred Sherman was an American scientist who pioneered the use of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model for studying the genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry of eukaryotic cells. His research encompassed broad areas of yeast biology including gene expression, protein synthesis, messenger RNA processing, bioenergetics, and mechanisms of mutagenesis. He also contributed extensively to the genetics of the opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans.
Alexander Hoffmann is a German-American biologist. He is the director of the Institute for Quantitative and Computational Biosciences (QCBio) and the Thomas M Asher Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology, and Molecular Genetics (MIMG) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). His research interest is the development of a predictive understanding of how cellular and molecular networks regulate immune responses.
Robert L. Last is a plant biochemical genomicist who studies metabolic processes that protect plants from the environment and produce products important for animal and human nutrition. His research has covered (1) production and breakdown of essential amino acids, (2) the synthesis and protective roles of Vitamin C and Vitamin E (tocopherols) as well as identification of mechanisms that protect photosystem II from damage, and (3) synthesis and biological functions of plant protective specialized metabolites. Four central questions are: (i) how are leaf and seed amino acids levels regulated, (ii.) what mechanisms protect and repair photosystem II from stress-induced damage, (iii.) how do plants produce protective metabolites in their glandular secreting trichomes (iv.) and what are the evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to the tremendous diversity of specialized metabolites that protect plants from insects and pathogens and are used as therapeutic agents.
Arabidopsis thaliana is a first class model organism and the single most important species for fundamental research in plant molecular genetics.
Metavirus is a genus of viruses in the family Metaviridae. They are retrotransposons that invade a eukaryotic host genome and may only replicate once the virus has infected the host. These genetic elements exist to infect and replicate in their host genome and are derived from ancestral elements unrelated from their host. Metavirus may use several different hosts for transmission, and has been found to be transmissible through ovule and pollen of some plants.
Myung Kyungjae is a biologist researching DNA repair pathways at the molecular level. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and the Director of the IBS Center for Genomic Integrity located on the UNIST campus. He is on the editorial board of various peer-reviewed journals and is a member of multiple scientific societies.
Michel Delseny is director of research emeritus at the CNRS and a member of the French Academy of sciences.
Jian-Kang Zhu is a plant scientist, researcher and academic. He is a Senior Principal Investigator in the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is also the Academic Director of CAS Center of Excellence in Plant Sciences.