Errol Friedberg | |
|---|---|
 Friedberg in 2003 | |
| Born | Errol Clive Friedberg |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | University of Witwatersrand [1] |
| Known for | |
| Awards |
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| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Molecular biology |
| Institutions | University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center |
Errol Clive Friedberg is a retired biologist and historian of science in the Department of Pathology at Stanford University and subsequently the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. [2]
He studied medicine at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and subsequently received postdoctoral training in biochemistry and pathology at Case Western Reserve University before joining the faculty at Stanford University.
Friedberg's research contributions center on understanding how cells repair and/or tolerate unrepaired damage to DNA and defining the biological consequences of unrepaired DNA damage. He has edited and written several editions of DNA Repair and Mutagenesis , published by ASM Press.
Friedberg has also published several volumes on aspects of the history of molecular biology, including Correcting the Blueprint of Life-An Historical Account of the Discovery of DNA Repair Mechanisms, The Writing Life of James D. Watson , From Rags to Riches-The Phenomenal Rise of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, Sydney Brenner: A Biography, A Biography of Paul Berg-The Recombinant DNA Controversy Revisited,Emperor of Enzymes-A Biography of Arthur Kornberg, Biochemist and Nobel Laureate.
Friedberg has contributed over 400 papers to the scientific literature, and is Founding Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal DNA Repair . [3] [4]
James Dewey Watson KBE is an American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist. In 1953, he co-authored with Francis Crick the academic paper proposing the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. Watson, Crick and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". In subsequent years, it has been recognized that Watson and his colleagues did not properly attribute colleague Rosalind Franklin for her contributions to the discovery of the double helix structure.
Michael Smith was a British-born Canadian biochemist and businessman. He shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Kary Mullis for his work in developing site-directed mutagenesis. Following a PhD in 1956 from the University of Manchester, he undertook postdoctoral research with Har Gobind Khorana at the British Columbia Research Council in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Subsequently, Smith worked at the Fisheries Research Board of Canada Laboratory in Vancouver before being appointed a professor of biochemistry in the UBC Faculty of Medicine in 1966. Smith's career included roles as the founding director of the UBC Biotechnology Laboratory and the founding scientific leader of the Protein Engineering Network of Centres of Excellence (PENCE). In 1996 he was named Peter Wall Distinguished Professor of Biotechnology. Subsequently he became the founding director of the Genome Sequencing Centre at the BC Cancer Research Centre.
Sydney Brenner was a South African biologist. In 2002, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with H. Robert Horvitz and Sir John E. Sulston. Brenner made significant contributions to work on the genetic code, and other areas of molecular biology while working in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, England. He established the roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for the investigation of developmental biology, and founded the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, United States.
Jacques Lucien Monod was a French biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965, sharing it with François Jacob and André Lwoff "for their discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis".
Endonucleases are enzymes that cleave the phosphodiester bond within a polynucleotide chain. Some, such as deoxyribonuclease I, cut DNA relatively nonspecifically, while many, typically called restriction endonucleases or restriction enzymes, cleave only at very specific nucleotide sequences. Endonucleases differ from exonucleases, which cleave the ends of recognition sequences instead of the middle (endo) portion. Some enzymes known as "exo-endonucleases", however, are not limited to either nuclease function, displaying qualities that are both endo- and exo-like. Evidence suggests that endonuclease activity experiences a lag compared to exonuclease activity.
Pyrimidine dimers are molecular lesions formed from thymine or cytosine bases in DNA via photochemical reactions. Ultraviolet light (UV) induces the formation of covalent linkages between consecutive bases along the nucleotide chain in the vicinity of their carbon–carbon double bonds. The dimerization reaction can also occur among pyrimidine bases in dsRNA —uracil or cytosine. Two common UV products are cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) and 6–4 photoproducts. These premutagenic lesions alter the structure and possibly the base-pairing. Up to 50–100 such reactions per second might occur in a skin cell during exposure to sunlight, but are usually corrected within seconds by photolyase reactivation or nucleotide excision repair. Uncorrected lesions can inhibit polymerases, cause misreading during transcription or replication, or lead to arrest of replication. Pyrimidine dimers are the primary cause of melanomas in humans.
Ada, also called as O6 alkyl guanine transferase I (O6 AGT I), is an enzyme induced by treatment of bacterial cells with alkylating agents that mainly cause methylation damage. This phenomenon is called the adaptive response hence the name. Ada transfers the alkyl group from DNA bases and sugar-phosphate backbone to a cysteine residue, inactivating itself. Consequently, it reacts stoichiometrically with its substrate rather than catalytically and is referred to as a suicide enzyme. Methylation of Ada protein converts it into a self transcriptional activator, inducing its own gene expression and the expression of other genes which together with Ada help the cells repair alkylation damage. Ada removes the alkyl group attached to DNA bases like guanine (O6-alkyl guanine) or thymine (O4-alkyl thymine) and to the oxygen of the phosphodiester backbone of the DNA. However, Ada shows greater preference for O6- alkyl guanine compared to either O4-thymine and alkylated phosphotriesters. Ada enzyme has two active sites, one for the alkylated guanines and thymines and the other for alkylated phosphotriesters.
AlkB protein is a protein found in E. coli, induced during an adaptive response and involved in the direct reversal of alkylation damage. AlkB specifically removes alkylation damage to single stranded (SS) DNA caused by SN2 type of chemical agents. It efficiently removes methyl groups from 1-methyl adenines, 3-methyl cytosines in SS DNA. AlkB is an alpha-ketoglutarate-dependent hydroxylase, a superfamily non-haem iron-containing proteins. It oxidatively demethylates the DNA substrate. Demethylation by AlkB is accompanied with release of CO2, succinate, and formaldehyde.
O6-alkylguanine DNA alkyltransferase II previously known as O6 Guanine transferase (ogt) is a bacterial protein that is involved in DNA repair together with Ada.
Excision repair cross-complementing (ERCC) is a set of proteins which are involved in DNA repair.
Graham Charles Walker is an American biologist, notable for his work explicating the structure and function of proteins involved in DNA repair and mutagenesis, with applications for cancer, and for understanding rhizobium (bacterial) functions that infect plants and mammals.
Leslie Barnett was a British biologist who worked with Francis Crick, Sydney Brenner, and Richard J. Watts-Tobin to genetically demonstrate the triplet nature of the code of protein translation through the Crick, Brenner, Barnett, Watts-Tobin et al. experiment of 1961, which discovered frameshift mutations; this insight provided early elucidation of the nature of the genetic code.
DNA Repair and Mutagenesis is a college-level textbook about DNA repair and mutagenesis written by Errol Friedberg, Graham Walker, Wolfram Siede, Richard D. Wood, and Roger Schultz. In its second edition as of 2009, DNA Repair and Mutagenesis contains over 1,000 pages, 10,000 references and 700 illustrations and has been described as "the most comprehensive book available in [the] field."
Frank Sherwood Taylor was a British historian of science, museum curator, and chemist who was Director of the Science Museum in London, England.
Molecular cloning is a set of experimental methods in molecular biology that are used to assemble recombinant DNA molecules and to direct their replication within host organisms. The use of the word cloning refers to the fact that the method involves the replication of one molecule to produce a population of cells with identical DNA molecules. Molecular cloning generally uses DNA sequences from two different organisms: the species that is the source of the DNA to be cloned, and the species that will serve as the living host for replication of the recombinant DNA. Molecular cloning methods are central to many contemporary areas of modern biology and medicine.
Siamon Gordon is a British pathologist. He is Glaxo Wellcome Professor Emeritus of Cellular Pathology at the University of Oxford.
Janet E. Mertz is an American biochemist, molecular biologist, and cancer researcher. She is currently the Elizabeth McCoy Professor of Oncology in the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Mertz is best known for disputing Lawrence Summers' 2005 suggestion that women lack the intrinsic aptitude to excel in mathematics at the highest level and for discovering an easy method for joining together DNAs from different species This latter finding initiated the era of genetic engineering whose ramifications form the basis of modern genetics and the biotechnology industry.
Merton Franklin Utter was an American microbiologist and biochemist.
Anna Marie (Ann) Skalka is an American virologist, molecular biologist and geneticist who is Professor Emeritus and Senior Advisor to the President at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. She is a co-author of a textbook on virology, Principles of Virology.
Sylvy Kornberg née Sylvia Ruth Levy (1917-1986) was an American biochemist who carried out research on DNA replication and polyphosphate synthesis. She discovered and characterized polyphosphate kinase (PPK), an enzyme that helps build long chains of phosphate groups called polyphosphate (PolyP) that play a variety of metabolic and regulatory functions. She worked closely with her husband and research partner, Arthur Kornberg, contributing greatly to the characterization of DNA polymerization that earned him the 1959 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
