Jonathan M. Scholey (born 1955 in Yorkshire, England) is a cell biologist and distinguished professor emeritus from the department of molecular and cellular biology at the University of California, Davis. [1] He worked on the cell biology of motor proteins and the mechanisms of mitosis and ciliogenesis.
He earned a B.Sc. in Cell and Molecular Biology with first-class honors from King’s College London, Biophysics Department / MRC Cell Biophysics Unit in 1977. [2] He then pursued doctoral studies at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Trinity College, Cambridge, completing a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology in 1981 under the supervision of the biochemist, Dr Jake Kendrick-Jones. [2] His doctoral research focused on the regulation of myosin-2 motors, which function in muscle contraction and cytokinesis, by calcium ions and light chain phosphorylation. [3]
From 1982 to 1986, Scholey held a traveling postdoctoral fellowship from the Medical Research Council, and a basic science exchange fellowship from the British Heart Foundation and American Heart Association, to support his work in the laboratory of the cell biologist, Dr J. Richard McIntosh in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. [2] In the McIntosh lab, he worked on mitotic motor proteins, notably kinesins and dyneins, and together with his coworkers, found that kinesin motors localize to mitotic spindles. [4]
In 1986 Scholey was appointed a staff scientist on the faculty of the Division of Molecular and Cell Biology at the National Jewish Hospital and Research Center in Denver, where he first established his independent research group. [5] [6] In 1989 he moved his group to the University of California, Davis, joining the Departments of Zoology and Molecular and Cellular Biology, where he remained until his retirement in 2015. [5] There he taught several classes in cell biology and related biophysical subjects and, with members of the iBiology team, developed a "flipped" cell biology course. [7] He also worked as a visiting Fulbright Scholar teaching classes in the Department of Molecular Biology and Genetics at Bosphorus University in Istanbul, Türkiye. [8]
He was elected chair of the 1996 Gordon Research Conference on Motile and Contractile Systems. [9] He served on the Editorial Boards of The Journal of Biological Chemistry , Molecular Biology of the Cell, and Cytoskeleton, and during 2012-2015 he was a member of the NIH Cell Biology study section (Nuclear and Cytoplasmic Structure, Function and Dynamics). In 2017 he was inducted as a Fellow of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) [10]
The research of the Scholey lab focused on the molecular mechanisms underlying mitosis and ciliogenesis, with particular emphasis on the roles of microtubule-based motor proteins such as kinesins and dyneins. [11] An early contribution to the motor protein field was the development of monoclonal antibodies that inhibit kinesin-driven motility [6] and were used to help identify the kinesin superfamily motor domain. [12]
In mitosis research, he was a proponent of the theory that kinesin-5 motors are bipolar homotetramers with pairs of motor domains at opposite ends of a central rod, [13] capable of mediating a sliding filament mechanism that underlies several aspects of mitotic spindle function, [14] e.g. anaphase B spindle elongation. [15]
In the field of ciliogenesis, his laboratory discovered and characterized heterotrimeric kinesin-2, [16] an anterograde motor which they found to be essential for ciliary assembly on swimming sea urchin embryos. [17] They went on to demonstrate that kinesin-2 exists in both heterotrimeric and homodimeric forms in Caenorhabditis elegans sensory neuronal cilia, where the two forms cooperate with the retrograde motor, dynein-2, to drive intraflagellar transport (IFT). [18]