Miroslav Radman (born April 30, 1944) is a Croatian biologist.
Miroslav Radman (born April 30, 1944) is a Croatian biologist.
Radman was born in Split, PR Croatia, Yugoslavia. From 1962–1967 he studied experimental biology, physical chemistry and molecular biology at the University of Zagreb and in 1969 he obtained a doctorate degree in molecular biology at the Free University of Brussels. He spent the next three years at Harvard University as a postdoctoral researcher. From 1973 until 1983 he was Professor of Molecular Biology at the Free University of Brussels and from 1983 until 1998 the Research Director at the French Centre for Scientific Research at the University of Paris 7. He is now a professor of cellular biology at the Faculté de Médecine – Necker, Université Paris V, Paris, France. In 2002 he became a full member of the French Academy of Sciences, the first Croat to do so in the Academy's history. Radman is a co-founder of the Mediterranean Institute For Life Sciences located in Split, Croatia. [1] [2]
Radman's specialty is DNA repair. His work with Evelyn M. Witkin set the basis for the discovery of the SOS response. The SOS response hypothesis was put forward by Radman in 1970 in a letter sent to various researchers, and later published in 1974. [3] [4]
With his group he demonstrated the molecular mechanism of speciation by showing that DNA mismatch repair mechanism prevents recombination between similar chromosomes which leads to establishment of genetic barriers between species. [5]
In 2011 Radman won the FEMS-Lwoff Award, given out by the Federation of European Microbiological Societies, for his research of DNA repair mechanism in Deinococcus radiodurans . He clarified the molecular mechanism that allows Deinococcus radiodurans to repair its fatally damaged DNA. [6] [7]
Radman developed a methodology which enables direct visualization of horizontal gene transfer. [8]
Mutagenesis is a process by which the genetic information of an organism is changed by the production of a mutation. It may occur spontaneously in nature, or as a result of exposure to mutagens. It can also be achieved experimentally using laboratory procedures. A mutagen is a mutation-causing agent, be it chemical or physical, which results in an increased rate of mutations in an organism's genetic code. In nature mutagenesis can lead to cancer and various heritable diseases, and it is also a driving force of evolution. Mutagenesis as a science was developed based on work done by Hermann Muller, Charlotte Auerbach and J. M. Robson in the first half of the 20th century.
François Jacob was a French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through regulation of transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.
A DNA polymerase is a member of a family of enzymes that catalyze the synthesis of DNA molecules from nucleoside triphosphates, the molecular precursors of DNA. These enzymes are essential for DNA replication and usually work in groups to create two identical DNA duplexes from a single original DNA duplex. During this process, DNA polymerase "reads" the existing DNA strands to create two new strands that match the existing ones. These enzymes catalyze the chemical reaction
Desiccation is the state of extreme dryness, or the process of extreme drying. A desiccant is a hygroscopic substance that induces or sustains such a state in its local vicinity in a moderately sealed container.
dnaQ is the gene encoding the ε subunit of DNA polymerase III in Escherichia coli. The ε subunit is one of three core proteins in the DNA polymerase complex. It functions as a 3’→5’ DNA directed proofreading exonuclease that removes incorrectly incorporated bases during replication. dnaQ may also be referred to as mutD.
The SOS response is a global response to DNA damage in which the cell cycle is arrested and DNA repair and mutagenesis is induced. The system involves the RecA protein. The RecA protein, stimulated by single-stranded DNA, is involved in the inactivation of the repressor (LexA) of SOS response genes thereby inducing the response. It is an error-prone repair system that contributes significantly to DNA changes observed in a wide range of species.
DNA repair is a collection of processes by which a cell identifies and corrects damage to the DNA molecules that encode its genome. In human cells, both normal metabolic activities and environmental factors such as radiation can cause DNA damage, resulting in tens of thousands of individual molecular lesions per cell per day. Many of these lesions cause structural damage to the DNA molecule and can alter or eliminate the cell's ability to transcribe the gene that the affected DNA encodes. Other lesions induce potentially harmful mutations in the cell's genome, which affect the survival of its daughter cells after it undergoes mitosis. As a consequence, the DNA repair process is constantly active as it responds to damage in the DNA structure. When normal repair processes fail, and when cellular apoptosis does not occur, irreparable DNA damage may occur, including double-strand breaks and DNA crosslinkages. This can eventually lead to malignant tumors, or cancer as per the two hit hypothesis.
Franklin (Frank) William Stahl is an American molecular biologist and geneticist. With Matthew Meselson, Stahl conducted the famous Meselson-Stahl experiment showing that DNA is replicated by a semiconservative mechanism, meaning that each strand of the DNA serves as a template for production of a new strand.
Homologous recombination is a type of genetic recombination in which genetic information is exchanged between two similar or identical molecules of double-stranded or single-stranded nucleic acids.
Recombineering is a genetic and molecular biology technique based on homologous recombination systems, as opposed to the older/more common method of using restriction enzymes and ligases to combine DNA sequences in a specified order. Recombineering is widely used for bacterial genetics, in the generation of target vectors for making a conditional mouse knockout, and for modifying DNA of any source often contained on a bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC), among other applications.
André Michel Lwoff was a French microbiologist and Nobel laureate of Russian-Polish origin.
Paul Lawrence Modrich is an American biochemist, James B. Duke Professor of Biochemistry at Duke University and Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is known for his research on DNA mismatch repair. Modrich received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2015, jointly with Aziz Sancar and Tomas Lindahl.
Postreplication repair is the repair of damage to the DNA that takes place after replication.
Evelyn M. Witkin is an American geneticist who was awarded the National Medal of Science for her work on DNA mutagenesis and DNA repair.
Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophilic bacterium and one of the most radiation-resistant organisms known. It can survive cold, dehydration, vacuum, and acid, and therefore is known as a polyextremophile. It has been listed as the world's toughest known bacterium in The Guinness Book Of World Records.
Maurice Sanford Fox was an American geneticist and molecular biologist, and professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he served as department chair between 1985 and 1989. His pioneering investigations of bacterial transformation helped illuminate the mechanisms by which donor DNA enters and is integrated into a host cell. His research also contributed to our understanding of mechanisms of DNA mutation, recombination, and mismatch repair more generally. Ancillary activities include his critical role in the establishment of the Council for a Livable World. He was married to photo researcher Sally Fox, who died in 2006, for over 50 years, and has three sons. Fox died in January 2020 at the age of 95.
DNA Polymerase V is a polymerase enzyme involved in DNA repair mechanisms in bacteria, such as Escherichia coli. It is composed of a UmuD' homodimer and a UmuC monomer, forming the UmuD'2C protein complex. It is part of the Y-family of DNA Polymerases, which are capable of performing DNA translesion synthesis (TLS). Translesion polymerases bypass DNA damage lesions during DNA replication - if a lesion is not repaired or bypassed the replication fork can stall and lead to cell death. However, Y polymerases have low sequence fidelity during replication. When the UmuC and UmuD' proteins were initially discovered in E. coli, they were thought to be agents that inhibit faithful DNA replication and caused DNA synthesis to have high mutation rates after exposure to UV-light. The polymerase function of Pol V was not discovered until the late 1990s when UmuC was successfully extracted, consequent experiments unequivocally proved UmuD'2C is a polymerase. This finding lead to the detection of many Pol V orthologs and the discovery of the Y-family of polymerases.
Bacteriophage Mu, also known as mu phage or mu bacteriophage, is a muvirus of the family Myoviridae which has been shown to cause genetic transposition. It is of particular importance as its discovery in Escherichia coli by Larry Taylor was among the first observations of insertion elements in a genome. This discovery opened up the world to an investigation of transposable elements and their effects on a wide variety of organisms. While Mu was specifically involved in several distinct areas of research, the wider implications of transposition and insertion transformed the entire field of genetics.
Deinococcus deserti is a Gram-negative, rod-shaped bacterium that belongs to the Deinococcaceae, a group of extremely radiotolerant bacteria. D. deserti and other Deinococcaceae exhibit an extraordinary ability to withstand ionizing radiation.
Kuppamuthu Dharmalingam is an Indian proteomicist, geneticist, academic and the founder of Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics at Madurai Kamaraj University. He is known for his contributions in the fields of eye disease proteomics and mutagenic DNA repair in Escherichia coli. He is an elected fellow of the Indian Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, India. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1992, for his contributions to biological sciences.
