Melissa A. Wilson | |
---|---|
Born | Stillwater, Oklahoma |
Nationality | American |
Citizenship | United States |
Alma mater | Creighton University (BS: Medical Mathematics), Pennsylvania State University (PhD: Integrative Biology) |
Known for | Science Communication, research on sex chromosomes |
Spouse | Scott Sayres (m. 2010, divorced 2019) |
Scientific career | |
Thesis | (2011) |
Doctoral advisor | Kateryna Makova |
Website | www |
Melissa A. Wilson is an evolutionary and computational biologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies the evolution of sex chromosomes. [1] [2] [3]
Wilson was born in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and lived there until she was five, then moving to Garland, Texas, then Tempe, Arizona, then to Syracuse, Nebraska. [4] She graduated from Syracuse High School in Nebraska [5] and received her B.S. in Medical Mathematics with Honors in May 2005 from Creighton University under Lance Nielsen. [6]
She received her Ph.D. in integrative biology at Pennsylvania State University under her thesis advisor Kateryna Makova in 2011. [3] She then completed a postdoctoral fellowship under Rasmus Nielsen at UC Berkeley in 2014.
She was professionally known as Melissa A. Wilson Sayres from 2010 until her divorce from Scott Sayres, a physical chemist, [4] [7] in 2019. [8] Together they have one daughter. [4]
Wilson is an assistant professor of genomics, evolution, and bioinformatics at Arizona State University. There she is PI of the Sex Chromosome Lab, where she studies genome evolution, mutation rate variation, and population history. [2] One finding of her lab is that crossing over between the X and Y chromosomes occurs in some regions of the chromosomes more often than was previously thought. [9] Another discovery is that the Y chromosome is not decreasing in size, [10] [11] [12] which contradicts previously publicised claims that the Y chromosome might disappear. [13]
She also discovered evidence of a Y chromosome population bottleneck in human history. [14] [15] Wilson hypothesised that a possible explanation for this was partially cultural, saying "“Instead of ‘survival of the fittest’ in a biological sense, the accumulation of wealth and power may have increased the reproductive success of a limited number of ‘socially fit’ males and their sons.” [16]
The lab uses the Gila monster as a model organism to understand the evolution of sex chromosomes. [17] [18] As part of her research, she started a crowdfunding campaign which successfully raised over $10,000 to sequence the Gila monster's DNA. [19] [18] She has referred to the animals as "cool" and "lovable." [18]
Wilson holds one patent for tumor treatments, [20] and is the developer of several software packages, including XYalign, for accurately aligning sex chromosomes, [21] and TumorSim, for simulating tumor heterogeneity. [22]
Wilson is active in public outreach. [23] [5] [4] She is a regular on the ASU "Ask a Scientist" podcast and has been interviewed by the New York Times, [24] The Atlantic, [18] Smithsonian Magazine, [25] and the Pacific Standard, [15] among others, as an expert on genetics. She has also publicly spoken out against the use of science to justify white supremacy [26] and transphobia, [27] and against the maltreatment of victims of sexual assault. [28]
A chromosome is a long DNA molecule with part or all of the genetic material of an organism. In most chromosomes the very long thin DNA fibers are coated with packaging proteins; in eukaryotic cells the most important of these proteins are the histones. These proteins, aided by chaperone proteins, bind to and condense the DNA molecule to maintain its integrity. These chromosomes display a complex three-dimensional structure, which plays a significant role in transcriptional regulation.
In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA. The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding genes, other functional regions of the genome such as regulatory sequences, and often a substantial fraction of junk DNA with no evident function. Almost all eukaryotes have mitochondria and a small mitochondrial genome. Algae and plants also contain chloroplasts with a chloroplast genome.
Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic phenomenon that causes genes to be expressed or not, depending on whether they are inherited from the mother or the father. Genes can also be partially imprinted. Partial imprinting occurs when alleles from both parents are differently expressed rather than complete expression and complete suppression of one parent's allele. Forms of genomic imprinting have been demonstrated in fungi, plants and animals. In 2014, there were about 150 imprinted genes known in mice and about half that in humans. As of 2019, 260 imprinted genes have been reported in mice and 228 in humans.
The Y chromosome is one of two sex chromosomes in therian mammals and other organisms. Along with the X chromosome, it is part of the XY sex-determination system, in which the Y is the sex-determining because it is the presence or absence of Y chromosome that determines the male or female sex of offspring produced in sexual reproduction. In mammals, the Y chromosome contains the SRY gene, which triggers development of male gonads. The Y chromosome is passed only from male parents to male offspring.
Genome projects are scientific endeavours that ultimately aim to determine the complete genome sequence of an organism and to annotate protein-coding genes and other important genome-encoded features. The genome sequence of an organism includes the collective DNA sequences of each chromosome in the organism. For a bacterium containing a single chromosome, a genome project will aim to map the sequence of that chromosome. For the human species, whose genome includes 22 pairs of autosomes and 2 sex chromosomes, a complete genome sequence will involve 46 separate chromosome sequences.
Gene duplication is a major mechanism through which new genetic material is generated during molecular evolution. It can be defined as any duplication of a region of DNA that contains a gene. Gene duplications can arise as products of several types of errors in DNA replication and repair machinery as well as through fortuitous capture by selfish genetic elements. Common sources of gene duplications include ectopic recombination, retrotransposition event, aneuploidy, polyploidy, and replication slippage.
An inversion is a chromosome rearrangement in which a segment of a chromosome becomes inverted within its original position. An inversion occurs when a chromosome undergoes a two breaks within the chromosomal arm, and the segment between the two breaks inserts itself in the opposite direction in the same chromosome arm. The breakpoints of inversions often happen in regions of repetitive nucleotides, and the regions may be reused in other inversions. Chromosomal segments in inversions can be as small as 100 kilobases or as large as 100 megabases. The number of genes captured by an inversion can range from a handful of genes to hundreds of genes. Inversions can happen either through ectopic recombination, chromosomal breakage and repair, or non-homologous end joining.
The pseudoautosomal regions, PAR1, PAR2, are homologous sequences of nucleotides on the X and Y chromosomes.
The ZW sex-determination system is a chromosomal system that determines the sex of offspring in birds, some fish and crustaceans such as the giant river prawn, some insects, the schistosome family of flatworms, and some reptiles, e.g. majority of snakes, lacertid lizards and monitors including Komodo dragons. It is also present in some plants, where it has probably evolved independently on several occasions. The letters Z and W are used to distinguish this system from the XY sex-determination system. In the ZW system, females have a pair of dissimilar ZW chromosomes, and males have two similar ZZ chromosomes.
The Human Genome Project (HGP) was an international scientific research project with the goal of determining the base pairs that make up human DNA, and of identifying, mapping and sequencing all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. It started in 1990 and was completed in 2003. It remains the world's largest collaborative biological project. Planning for the project started after it was adopted in 1984 by the US government, and it officially launched in 1990. It was declared complete on April 14, 2003, and included about 92% of the genome. Level "complete genome" was achieved in May 2021, with a remaining only 0.3% bases covered by potential issues. The final gapless assembly was finished in January 2022.
Wen-Hsiung Li is a Taiwanese-American scientist working in the fields of molecular evolution, population genetics, and genomics. He is currently the James Watson Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the University of Chicago and a Principal Investigator at the Institute of Information Science and Genomics Research Center, Academia Sinica, Taiwan.
A sex chromosome (also referred to as an allosome, heterotypical chromosome, gonosome, heterochromosome, or idiochromosome is a chromosome that differs from an ordinary autosome in form, size, and behavior. The human sex chromosomes, a typical pair of mammal allosomes, carry the genes that determine the sex of an individual created in sexual reproduction. Autosomes differ from allosomes because autosomes appear in pairs whose members have the same form but differ from other pairs in a diploid cell, whereas members of an allosome pair may differ from one another and thereby determine sex.
Barbara J. Meyer is a biologist and genetist, noted for her pioneering research on lambda phage, a virus that infects bacteria; discovery of the master control gene involved in sex determination; and studies of gene regulation, particularly dosage compensation. Meyer's work has revealed mechanisms of sex determination and dosage compensation—that balance X-chromosome gene expression between the sexes in Caenorhabditis elegans that continue to serve as the foundation of diverse areas of study on chromosome structure and function today.
The western clawed frog is a species of frog in the family Pipidae, also known as tropical clawed frog. It is the only species in the genus Xenopus to have a diploid genome. Its genome has been sequenced, making it a significant model organism for genetics that complements the related species Xenopus laevis, a widely used vertebrate model for developmental biology. X. tropicalis also has a number of advantages over X. laevis in research, such as a much shorter generation time, smaller size, and a larger number of eggs per spawn.
Cancer genome sequencing is the whole genome sequencing of a single, homogeneous or heterogeneous group of cancer cells. It is a biochemical laboratory method for the characterization and identification of the DNA or RNA sequences of cancer cell(s).
Jennifer Ann Marshall Graves is an Australian geneticist. She is Distinguished Professor within the La Trobe Institute for Molecular Science, La Trobe University, Australia and Professor Emeritus of the Australian National University.
Aoife McLysaght is an Irish geneticist and a professor in the Molecular Evolution Laboratory of the Smurfit Institute of Genetics, Trinity College Dublin in Ireland.
Yaniv Erlich is an Israeli-American scientist. He formerly served as an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University and was the Chief Science Officer of MyHeritage. Erlich's work combines computer science and genomics.
Mutation bias is a pattern in which some type of mutation occurs more often than expected under uniformity. The types are most often defined by the molecular nature of the mutational change, but sometimes they are based on downstream effects, e.g., Ostrow, et al.
Kenro Kusumi, a genome biologist and professor, Dean of Natural Sciences in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University.