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Trudi Schüpbach is a Swiss-American molecular biologist. She is an Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University, where her laboratory studies molecular and genetic mechanisms in fruit fly oogenesis.
Hox genes, a subset of homeobox genes, are a group of related genes that specify regions of the body plan of an embryo along the head-tail axis of animals. Hox proteins encode and specify the characteristics of 'position', ensuring that the correct structures form in the correct places of the body. For example, Hox genes in insects specify which appendages form on a segment, and Hox genes in vertebrates specify the types and shape of vertebrae that will form. In segmented animals, Hox proteins thus confer segmental or positional identity, but do not form the actual segments themselves.
Ultrabithorax (Ubx) is a homeobox gene found in insects, and is used in the regulation of patterning in morphogenesis. There are many possible products of this gene, which function as transcription factors. Ubx is used in the specification of serially homologous structures, and is used at many levels of developmental hierarchies. In Drosophila melanogaster it is expressed in the third thoracic (T3) and first abdominal (A1) segments and represses wing formation. The Ubx gene regulates the decisions regarding the number of wings and legs the adult flies will have. The developmental role of the Ubx gene is determined by the splicing of its product, which takes place after translation of the gene. The specific splice factors of a particular cell allow the specific regulation of the developmental fate of that cell, by making different splice variants of transcription factors. In D. melanogaster, at least six different isoforms of Ubx exist.
Polycomb-group proteins are a family of protein complexes first discovered in fruit flies that can remodel chromatin such that epigenetic silencing of genes takes place. Polycomb-group proteins are well known for silencing Hox genes through modulation of chromatin structure during embryonic development in fruit flies. They derive their name from the fact that the first sign of a decrease in PcG function is often a homeotic transformation of posterior legs towards anterior legs, which have a characteristic comb-like set of bristles.
The family of heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1) consists of highly conserved proteins, which have important functions in the cell nucleus. These functions include gene repression by heterochromatin formation, transcriptional activation, regulation of binding of cohesion complexes to centromeres, sequestration of genes to the nuclear periphery, transcriptional arrest, maintenance of heterochromatin integrity, gene repression at the single nucleosome level, gene repression by heterochromatization of euchromatin, and DNA repair. HP1 proteins are fundamental units of heterochromatin packaging that are enriched at the centromeres and telomeres of nearly all eukaryotic chromosomes with the notable exception of budding yeast, in which a yeast-specific silencing complex of SIR proteins serve a similar function. Members of the HP1 family are characterized by an N-terminal chromodomain and a C-terminal chromoshadow domain, separated by a hinge region. HP1 is also found at some euchromatic sites, where its binding can correlate with either gene repression or gene activation. HP1 was originally discovered by Tharappel C James and Sarah Elgin in 1986 as a factor in the phenomenon known as position effect variegation in Drosophila melanogaster.
Period (per) is a gene located on the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster. Oscillations in levels of both per transcript and its corresponding protein PER have a period of approximately 24 hours and together play a central role in the molecular mechanism of the Drosophila biological clock driving circadian rhythms in eclosion and locomotor activity. Mutations in the per gene can shorten (perS), lengthen (perL), and even abolish (per0) the period of the circadian rhythm.
In molecular biology, heat shock factors (HSF), are the transcription factors that regulate the expression of the heat shock proteins. A typical example is the heat shock factor of Drosophila melanogaster.
In molecular biology, the BEN domain is a protein domain which is found in diverse proteins including:
Sarah C.R. Elgin is an American biochemist and geneticist. She is the Viktor Hamburger Professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and is noted for her work in epigenetics, gene regulation, and heterochromatin, and for her contributions to science education.
Michael Levine is an American developmental and cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology.
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine.
Paul H. Taghert is an American chronobiologist known for pioneering research on the roles and regulation of neuropeptide signaling in the brain using Drosophila melanogaster as a model. He is a professor of neuroscience in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis.
Lingadahalli Subrahmanya Shashidhara is an Indian developmental biologist, geneticist and a professor of biology currently serving as the Centre Director of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, India. He is a Professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Pune, and at Ashoka University, Sonepat, India. He heads the LSS Laboratory at IISER and is known for his studies on Drosophila, particularly the evolution of appendages and functions of homeotic selector genes. He is a J. C. Bose National Fellow of the Department of Science and Technology and an elected fellow of the Indian National Science Academy, 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 2008, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Jeffrey L. Price is an American researcher and author in the fields of circadian rhythms and molecular biology. His chronobiology work with Drosophila melanogaster has led to the discoveries of the circadian genes timeless (tim) and doubletime (dbt), and the doubletime regulators spaghetti (SPAG) and bride of doubletime (BDBT).
Karmella Ann Haynes is a biomedical engineer and associate professor at the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University. She researches how chromatin is used to control cell development in biological tissue.
Vincenzo Pirrotta is a biologist known for his work on Drosophila and polycomb group proteins. Born in Palermo, Italy, Pirotta migrated to the United States and enrolled at Harvard University. While at Harvard, he obtained undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral fellowships in physical chemistry and molecular biology. He later moved to Europe where he began studying gene regulation in bacteriophages and Drosophila. He was appointed assistant professor at the University of Basel in 1972. Pirotta returned to the United States, earning a full professorship at the Baylor College of Medicine in 1992. He then took up the position of professor of zoology at the University of Geneva in 2002, and in 2004 became a distinguished professor of molecular biology and biochemistry at Rutgers University.
David Suter is a Swiss physician and molecular and cell biologist. His research focuses on quantitative approaches to study gene expression and developmental cell fate decisions. He is currently a professor at EPFL, where he heads the Suter Lab at the Institute of Bioengineering of the School of Life Sciences.
Sex-lethal (Sxl) is a gene found in Dipteran insects, named for its mutation phenotype in Drosophila melanogaster. It is most closely related to the ELAV/HUD subfamily of splicing factors.
Alberto Kornblihtt is an Argentine molecular biologist who specializes in alternative ribonucleic acid splicing. During his postdoctoral training with Francisco Baralle in Oxford, Kornblihtt documented one of the first cases of alternative splicing, explaining how a single transcribed gene can generate multiple protein variants. Kornblihtt was elected as a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States in 2011, received the Diamond Award for the most relevant scientist of Argentina of the decade, alongside physicist Juan Martin Maldacena, in 2013, and was incorporated to the Académie des Sciences of France in 2022.
Eileen E. M. Furlong is an Irish molecular biologist working in the fields of transcription, chromatin biology, developmental biology and genomics. She is known for her work in understanding how the genome is regulated, in particular to how developmental enhancers function, how they interact within three dimensional chromatin topologies and how they drive cell fate decisions during embryogenesis. She is Head of the Department of Genome Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). Furlong was elected a member of the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2013, the Academia Europaea in 2016 and to EMBO’s research council in 2018.
References
- ↑ Chetverina, Darya; Erokhin, Maksim; Schedl, Paul (2021). "GAGA factor: a multifunctional pioneering chromatin protein". Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 78 (9): 4125–4141. doi:10.1007/s00018-021-03776-z. PMC 8815297 . PMID 33528710.
- ↑ Deshpande, Girish; Samuel, Mark E.; Schedl, Paul D. (1996). "Sex-lethal Interacts with Splicing Factors In Vitro and In Vivo". Molecular and Cellular Biology. 16 (9): 5036–5047. doi:10.1128/MCB.16.9.5036. PMC 231505 . PMID 8756662.
- ↑ Merritt, J.I. (September 30, 1987). "Fruit Flies". Princeton Alumni Weekly . Vol. 88. Princeton University Press. p. 19. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
- ↑ Patrusky, Ben (Fall 1992). "The Intron Story". Mosaic. Vol. 23, no. 3. The Foundation. p. 33. Retrieved July 30, 2021.
- ↑ Gilmutdinov, Rudolf; Kozlov, Eugene N.; Yakovlev, Konstantin V.; Olenina, Ludmila V.; Kotov 3, Alexei A.; Barr, Justinn; Zhukova, Mariya; Schedl, Paul; Shidlovskii, Yulii V. (2021). "The 3'UTR of the Drosophila CPEB translation factor gene orb2 plays a crucial role in spermatogenesis". Development. 148 (17): dev198788. doi:10.1242/dev.198788. PMC 8513165 . PMID 34473243.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link) - ↑ Schedl, Paul; Artavanis-Tsakonas, Spyridon; Steward, Ruth; Gehring, Walter J.; Mirault, Marc-Edouard; Goldschmidt-Clermont, Michel; Moran, Larry; Tissières, Alfred (1978). "Two hybrid plasmids with D. melanogaster DNA sequences complementary to mRNA coding for the major heat shock protein". Cell. 14 (4): 921–929. doi:10.1016/0092-8674(78)90346-X. PMID 99246.
