Kenneth Breslauer | |
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| Born | Jönköping, Sweden |
| Nationality | American (originally German) |
| Education | University of Wisconsin (B.A.), Yale University (Ph.D.) |
| Spouse | Sherrie Schwab |
| Children | 2 sons |
| Awards | Wolfgang Prize for outstanding teaching at Yale, 1970 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Communication between biological molecules |
| Institutions | Rutgers University |
| Thesis | (1972) |
| Doctoral advisor | Julian M. Sturtevant |
Kenneth Breslauer is the Linus C. Pauling Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University. He is the Founding Dean of the Division of Life Sciences and served as vice president for Health Science Partnerships. [1] [2] Kenneth Breslauer's research focuses on defining and characterizing the molecular forces that control communication between biological molecules, particularly those interactions that modulate and control gene expression, DNA damage repair, mutagenesis, and drug binding. Breslauer arrived at the university as an assistant professor in 1974.
Breslauer determined a DNA database that allows one to energetically map genome sequence information so as to correlate regions of differential stabilities with regions of differential biological functions. [3] The database and its extensions also have been used to design probes and drugs with predictable hybridization and binding properties, a capability key to various diagnostic and therapeutic protocols. Breslauer has mapped the energetic consequences of DNA damage, knowledge critical to understanding the mechanisms of DNA repair, including why certain mutations escape repair and result in cancer. Most recently, Breslauer has elucidated the significance of metastable states within the rough energy landscapes of DNA molecules, information critical to our understanding of the molecular origins of triple repeat diseases, such as Huntington's disease and fragile X syndrome.
Breslauer is the Executive Editor of Biopolymers, [4] a major journal in his field, and is founding editor of Nucleic Acid Sciences. [5] He also serves on numerous scientific advisory boards, including those associated with the Cancer Institute of New Jersey, [6] the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine, [7] as well as federal funding agency study sections.
As a Dean, Breslauer reorganized the life sciences into an administratively and programmatically integrated structure, the Division of Life Sciences (DLS). This entity encompasses three departments (Cell Biology and Neuroscience, Genetics, Molecular Biology and Biochemistry); two sections (Biological Chemistry, Behavioral Neuropsychology); multiple centers and institutes (the Biomaterials Center, the Human Genetics Institute, the Rutgers University Cell and DNA Repository, the W. M. Keck Center Collaborative Neurosciences, the Spinal Cord Injury Project, the Rutgers Stem Cell Research Center, the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics, etc.) and partnerships with existing life sciences centers, institutes, and schools. And a broad range of Core Facilities (confocal microscopy, high-field NMR, Mass Spectrometry, Calorimetry and Spectroscopy, Imaging, etc.). The Division of Life sciences also comprises the Office of Undergraduate Instruction (OUGI), which includes the Office of Diversity and Academic Success in the Sciences Archived 18 December 2008 at the Wayback Machine (ODASIS), the Health Professions Office(HPO); as well as the Graduate Office in Molecular Biosciences.
Administratively, under the direction of a Business Office, the DLS provides centralized grants management, procurement, personnel management, facilities maintenance and oversight, and IT support. Programmatically, an overarching theme of the DLS is the focus on translational research in which knowledge from the laboratory bench is rapidly translated into treatments at the bedside of the patient W.M. Keck Center for spinal cord injury, the New Jersey Center for biomaterials, the New Jersey Stem Cell institute and the Waksman Institute of Microbiology. [8]
Since 2005, the Divisional office is partly housed in the new Life Sciences building on the Busch campus,; a magnificent facility that represents the culmination of nearly a decade long campaign by Breslauer to build critically needed space for life science development. Currently, the building houses the New Jersey Center for Biomaterials, the Human Genetics Institute, and the Rutgers Department of Genetics. [9]
As Vice President for health science partnerships, Breslauer has assumed a leadership role in establishing with the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey the Stem Cell Institute of New Jersey, the Center for Clinical Translational Sciences, Shared Major Instrumentation Research Facilities, as well as partnerships with universities in China, Taiwan, Africa, and elsewhere, including mutually beneficial cooperative agreements with the private sector.
Kenneth Breslauer was born in Jönköping, Sweden and raised in the Jackson Heights section of Queens in New York City. His parents were natives of Germany but fled the country during Hitler's era. His father's father, George Breslauer, was a supreme court justice in Germany before Hitler came to power. His mother's father, Hans Schäffer, was an undersecretary of the treasury for the Weimar Republic from 1928 to 1932. [10] whose diaries were donated to the Leo Baeck Institute in Manhattan. [11] His older brother is former UC Berkeley Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost George W. Breslauer.
Kenneth Breslauer is married to Sherrie Schwab, a private-practice psychotherapist, and they have two sons (Daniel and Jordan). Both of them, like their parents, are big sports fans. [12] [ full citation needed ] Daniel, or "Danny" (Rutgers [BA] '10, NYU Stern [MBA] '17) is Director, Business Development at Frequency and a former sports broadcaster, and Jordan (NYU Stern School of Business [BS] '13) is Vice President, Product at Social Standards.
Although he started college as a history major, Kenneth Breslauer graduated in 1968 with honors from the University of Wisconsin, with both a bachelor's degree in chemistry as well as a B.A. degree. [13] During high school and his freshman year in college, Breslauer played left field on his schools’ baseball teams, and, subsequently, for a brief period, he followed his passion and played minor league baseball in West Haven, Connecticut. Breslauer was a baseball standout at McBurney High School in New York City (Class of 1964). During his PhD research at Yale University, Breslauer developed a new calorimetric method for investigating the molecular forces that control the stability and folding of proteins, His results were incorporated in databases for characterizing hydrophobic and hydrophilic forces associated with protein stability. He graduated from Yale in 1972. As a postdoc at the University of California at Berkeley, Breslauer investigated and characterized the molecular forces associated with dictating and controlling nucleic acid stability. At Rutgers since 1974, he combines these fields by investigating protein-DNA, and drug-DNA interactions, particularly as they relate to regulation of gene expression, DNA damage repair, and molecular diseases. Breslauer is author of over 200 publications. His most cited paper describes a model and presents a database that has been used throughout the field to predict DNA duplex stability from the base sequence, and it is cited over 1000 times. [14] This paper and subsequent work from his laboratory have led to a patent being issued to Breslauer and co-workers (No. 6,815,163) entitled “Methods and Kits for Screening Nucleic Acid Duplex Stability.” [15]
 | This section of a biography of a living person needs additional citations for verification .(February 2022) |
A base pair (bp) is a fundamental unit of double-stranded nucleic acids consisting of two nucleobases bound to each other by hydrogen bonds. They form the building blocks of the DNA double helix and contribute to the folded structure of both DNA and RNA. Dictated by specific hydrogen bonding patterns, "Watson–Crick" base pairs allow the DNA helix to maintain a regular helical structure that is subtly dependent on its nucleotide sequence. The complementary nature of this based-paired structure provides a redundant copy of the genetic information encoded within each strand of DNA. The regular structure and data redundancy provided by the DNA double helix make DNA well suited to the storage of genetic information, while base-pairing between DNA and incoming nucleotides provides the mechanism through which DNA polymerase replicates DNA and RNA polymerase transcribes DNA into RNA. Many DNA-binding proteins can recognize specific base-pairing patterns that identify particular regulatory regions of genes.
Deoxyribonucleic acid is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of all known organisms and many viruses. DNA and ribonucleic acid (RNA) are nucleic acids. Alongside proteins, lipids and complex carbohydrates (polysaccharides), nucleic acids are one of the four major types of macromolecules that are essential for all known forms of life.
Molecular biology is a branch of biology that seeks to understand the molecular basis of biological activity in and between cells, including biomolecular synthesis, modification, mechanisms, and interactions.
Nucleic acids are large biomolecules that are crucial in all cells and viruses. They are composed of nucleotides, which are the monomer components: a 5-carbon sugar, a phosphate group and a nitrogenous base. The two main classes of nucleic acids are deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) and ribonucleic acid (RNA). If the sugar is ribose, the polymer is RNA; if the sugar is deoxyribose, a variant of ribose, the polymer is DNA.
Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself or by forming a template for the production of proteins. RNA and deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) are nucleic acids. The nucleic acids constitute one of the four major macromolecules essential for all known forms of life. RNA is assembled as a chain of nucleotides. Cellular organisms use messenger RNA (mRNA) to convey genetic information that directs synthesis of specific proteins. Many viruses encode their genetic information using an RNA genome.
Peptide nucleic acid (PNA) is an artificially synthesized polymer similar to DNA or RNA.
Molecular genetics is a branch of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the structure and/or function of genes in an organism's genome using genetic screens.
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.
Helicases are a class of enzymes thought to be vital to all organisms. Their main function is to unpack an organism's genetic material. Helicases are motor proteins that move directionally along a nucleic acid phosphodiester backbone, separating two hybridized nucleic acid strands, using energy from ATP hydrolysis. There are many helicases, representing the great variety of processes in which strand separation must be catalyzed. Approximately 1% of eukaryotic genes code for helicases.
"Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" was the first article published to describe the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA, using X-ray diffraction and the mathematics of a helix transform. It was published by Francis Crick and James D. Watson in the scientific journal Nature on pages 737–738 of its 171st volume.
Nucleic acid thermodynamics is the study of how temperature affects the nucleic acid structure of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA). The melting temperature (Tm) is defined as the temperature at which half of the DNA strands are in the random coil or single-stranded (ssDNA) state. Tm depends on the length of the DNA molecule and its specific nucleotide sequence. DNA, when in a state where its two strands are dissociated, is referred to as having been denatured by the high temperature.
Nucleic acid analogues are compounds which are analogous to naturally occurring RNA and DNA, used in medicine and in molecular biology research. Nucleic acids are chains of nucleotides, which are composed of three parts: a phosphate backbone, a pentose sugar, either ribose or deoxyribose, and one of four nucleobases. An analogue may have any of these altered. Typically the analogue nucleobases confer, among other things, different base pairing and base stacking properties. Examples include universal bases, which can pair with all four canonical bases, and phosphate-sugar backbone analogues such as PNA, which affect the properties of the chain . Nucleic acid analogues are also called xeno nucleic acids and represent one of the main pillars of xenobiology, the design of new-to-nature forms of life based on alternative biochemistries.
Helen Miriam Berman is a Board of Governors Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Rutgers University and a former director of the RCSB Protein Data Bank. A structural biologist, her work includes structural analysis of protein-nucleic acid complexes, and the role of water in molecular interactions. She is also the founder and director of the Nucleic Acid Database, and led the Protein Structure Initiative Structural Genomics Knowledgebase.
Wilma K. Olson is the Mary I. Bunting professor at the Rutgers Center for Quantitative Biology (CQB) at Rutgers University. Olson has her own research group on the New Brunswick campus. Although she is a polymer chemist by training, her research aims to understand the influence of chemical architecture on the conformation, properties, and interactions of nucleic acids.
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.
Jay Tischfield is MacMillan Distinguished Professor and the Founding Chair of the Department of Genetics at Rutgers University. He is also Professor of Pediatrics and Psychiatry at Rutgers. He is currently Director of the Human Genetics Institute of New Jersey.
Tomas Robert Lindahl FRS FMedSci is a Swedish-British scientist specialising in cancer research. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with American chemist Paul L. Modrich and Turkish chemist Aziz Sancar for mechanistic studies of DNA repair.
Nucleic acid secondary structure is the basepairing interactions within a single nucleic acid polymer or between two polymers. It can be represented as a list of bases which are paired in a nucleic acid molecule. The secondary structures of biological DNAs and RNAs tend to be different: biological DNA mostly exists as fully base paired double helices, while biological RNA is single stranded and often forms complex and intricate base-pairing interactions due to its increased ability to form hydrogen bonds stemming from the extra hydroxyl group in the ribose sugar.
In the fields of geometry and biochemistry, a triple helix is a set of three congruent geometrical helices with the same axis, differing by a translation along the axis. This means that each of the helices keeps the same distance from the central axis. As with a single helix, a triple helix may be characterized by its pitch, diameter, and handedness. Examples of triple helices include triplex DNA, triplex RNA, the collagen helix, and collagen-like proteins.
Xeno nucleic acids (XNA) are synthetic nucleic acid analogues that have a different backbone than the ribose and deoxyribose found in the nucleic acids of naturally occurring RNA and DNA.
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