John Carbon

Last updated
John A. Carbon
NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of Illinois (B.S. 1952), Northwestern University (Ph.D., 1955)
Known forCarbon-Clarke equation, shotgun clone libraries, artificial chromosomes
SpouseLouise B. Clarke
Awards National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Scientific career
FieldsGenetic missense suppression, centromeres
Institutions Abbott Laboratories (North Chicago, Illinois), University of California, Santa Barbara

John A. Carbon, Ph.D. is a professor emeritus of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Contents

Biography

He earned his B.S. degree in chemistry in 1952 at the University of Illinois, and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry in 1955 from Northwestern University. He did basic research developing new anticancer drugs at Abbott Laboratories (North Chicago, IL) for 12 years (1956-1968). He joined the faculty of the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1968, and became professor emeritus in 1999. His research contributions include elucidation of the mechanism of genetic missense suppression in bacteria, the development of techniques to make genomic libraries using recombinant DNA, techniques for using yeast for DNA cloning, characterization of centromere DNA, and construction of the first artificial chromosomes. Many of his later research contributions were carried out in collaboration with his wife, Professor Louise B. Clarke. He was elected to membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1986. Carbon was among the founding scientific advisors of the Amgen Corporation. An endowed chair in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at UC Santa Barbara was named for Carbon. The chair is currently held by Jamey Marth. [1]

Carbon and Louise Clarke, his wife, published the Carbon-Clarke equation in 1976, used for calculating the number of clones required when constructing a clone library to ensure a given probability (usually > 99% is desired) of containing any sequence, given the size of the genome and the average size of a clone. [2]

Related Research Articles

Molecular biology is the branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions. The study of chemical and physical structure of biological macromolecules is known as molecular biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Smith (chemist)</span> British-born Canadian biochemist, businessman and Nobel Prize laureate (1932-2000)

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.

<i>Schizosaccharomyces pombe</i> Species of yeast

Schizosaccharomyces pombe, also called "fission yeast", is a species of yeast used in traditional brewing and as a model organism in molecular and cell biology. It is a unicellular eukaryote, whose cells are rod-shaped. Cells typically measure 3 to 4 micrometres in diameter and 7 to 14 micrometres in length. Its genome, which is approximately 14.1 million base pairs, is estimated to contain 4,970 protein-coding genes and at least 450 non-coding RNAs.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yeast artificial chromosome</span> Genetically engineered chromosome derived from the DNA of yeast

Yeast artificial chromosomes (YACs) are genetically engineered chromosomes derived from the DNA of the yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is then ligated into a bacterial plasmid. By inserting large fragments of DNA, from 100–1000 kb, the inserted sequences can be cloned and physically mapped using a process called chromosome walking. This is the process that was initially used for the Human Genome Project, however due to stability issues, YACs were abandoned for the use of Bacterial artificial chromosome

Tom Maniatis, is an American professor of molecular and cellular biology. He is a professor at Columbia University, and serves as the Scientific Director and CEO of the New York Genome Center.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry</span>

The Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry (MPIB) is a research institute of the Max Planck Society located in Martinsried, a suburb of Munich. The institute was founded in 1973 by the merger of three formerly independent institutes: the Max Planck Institute of Biochemistry, the Max Planck Institute of Protein and Leather Research, and the Max Planck Institute of Cell Chemistry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kim Nasmyth</span> British biochemist

Kim Ashley Nasmyth is an English geneticist, the Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford, a Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, former scientific director of the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), and former head of the Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford. He is best known for his work on the segregation of chromosomes during cell division.

A genomic library is a collection of overlapping DNA fragments that together make up the total genomic DNA of a single organism. The DNA is stored in a population of identical vectors, each containing a different insert of DNA. In order to construct a genomic library, the organism's DNA is extracted from cells and then digested with a restriction enzyme to cut the DNA into fragments of a specific size. The fragments are then inserted into the vector using DNA ligase. Next, the vector DNA can be taken up by a host organism - commonly a population of Escherichia coli or yeast - with each cell containing only one vector molecule. Using a host cell to carry the vector allows for easy amplification and retrieval of specific clones from the library for analysis.

Jeffrey Lynn Bennetzen is an American geneticist on the faculty of the University of Georgia (UGA). Bennetzen is known for his work describing codon usage bias in yeast, being the first to clone and sequence an active transposon in maize, and developing and proposing along with Michael Freeling the model of the grasses as a single genetic system. He is one of two authors, with Sarah Hake of the book "Handbook of Maize." Bennetzen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joachim Messing</span> German-American biologist (1946–2019)

Joachim Wilhelm "Jo" Messing was a German-American biologist who was a professor of molecular biology and the fourth director of the Waksman Institute of Microbiology at Rutgers University.

The history of genetics can be represented on a timeline of events from the earliest work in the 1850s, to the DNA era starting in the 1940s, and the genomics era beginning in the 1970s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Laurence Pearl</span>

Laurence Harris Pearl FRS FMedSci is a British biochemist and structural biologist who is currently Professor of Structural Biology in the Genome Damage and Stability Centre and was Head of the School of Life Sciences at the University of Sussex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce William Stillman</span> Australian biochemist and cancer researcher

Bruce William Stillman, AO, FAA, FRS is a biochemist and cancer researcher who has served as the Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) since 1994 and President since 2003. He also served as the Director of its NCI-designated Cancer Center for 25 years from 1992 to 2016. During his leadership, CSHL has been ranked as the No. 1 institution in molecular biology and genetics research by Thomson Reuters. Stillman's research focuses on how chromosomes are duplicated in human cells and in yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae; the mechanisms that ensure accurate inheritance of genetic material from one generation to the next; and how missteps in this process lead to cancer. For his accomplishments, Stillman has received numerous awards, including the Alfred P. Sloan, Jr. Prize in 2004 and the 2010 Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, both of which he shared with Thomas J. Kelly of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, as well as the 2019 Canada Gairdner International Award for biomedical research, which he shared with John Diffley.

Junhyong Kim is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Endowed Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of over eighty published scientific papers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roger Brent</span> American biologist

Roger Brent is an American biologist known for his work on gene regulation and systems biology. He studies the quantitative behaviors of cell signaling systems and the origins and consequences of variation in them. He is Full Member in the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

Synthetic genome is a synthetically built genome whose formation involves either genetic modification on pre-existing life forms or artificial gene synthesis to create new DNA or entire lifeforms. The field that studies synthetic genomes is called synthetic genomics.

William Charles Earnshaw is Professor of Chromosome Dynamics at the University of Edinburgh where he has been a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow since 1996.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kaustuv Sanyal</span>

Kaustuv Sanyal is an Indian molecular biologist, mycologist and a professor at the Molecular Biology and Genetics Unit of the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR). He is known for his molecular and genetic studies of pathogenic yeasts such as Candida and Cryptococcus). An alumnus of Bidhan Chandra Krishi Viswavidyalaya and Madurai Kamaraj University from where he earned a BSc in agriculture and MSc in biotechnology respectively, Sanyal did his doctoral studies at Bose Institute to secure a PhD in Yeast genetics. He moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA to work in the laboratory of John Carbon on the discovery of centromeres in Candida albicans. He joined JNCASR in 2005. He is a member of the Faculty of 1000 in the disciplines of Microbial Evolution and Genomics and has delivered invited speeches which include the Gordon Research Conference, EMBO conferences on comparative genomics and kinetochores. The Department of Biotechnology of the Government of India awarded him the National Bioscience Award for Career Development, one of the highest Indian science awards, for his contributions to biosciences, in 2012. He has also been awarded with the prestigious Tata Innovation Fellowship in 2017. The National Academy of Sciences, India elected him as a fellow in 2014. He is also an elected fellow of Indian Academy of Sciences (2017), and the Indian National Science Academy (2018). In 2019, he has been elected to Fellowship in the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM), the honorific leadership group within the American Society for Microbiology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tim J. Yen</span> American molecular biologist

Tim J. Yen is an American molecular biologist and cancer biologist. Yen is currently director of the Biological Imaging Facility at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Yen is known for pioneering work in the field of mitosis.

Teresa Shu-Fong Wang is an American biochemist.

References

  1. Bloom, K. (29 April 2015). "Anniversary of the discovery/isolation of the yeast centromere by Clarke and Carbon". Molecular Biology of the Cell. 26 (9): 1575–1577. doi:10.1091/mbc.E14-11-1512. PMC   4436770 . PMID   25926702.
  2. Clarke, Louise; Carbon, John (September 1976). "A colony bank containing synthetic CoI EI hybrid plasmids representative of the entire E. coli genome". Cell. 9 (1): 91–99. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(76)90055-6. PMID   788919. S2CID   2535372.