Peter Francis Cecil Gilbert | |
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| Born | 7 July 1944 |
| Nationality | British |
| Education | RGS, Newcastle upon Tyne |
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Peter Francis Cecil Gilbert (born 7 July 1944) is an English neuroscientist and biophysicist. He is known for his pioneering work on motor learning in the cerebellum. [2] [3] [4]
Gilbert was educated at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle upon Tyne. [5] He went on to attend Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge on a college scholarship, graduating in 1966 with a degree in natural sciences. Remaining in Cambridge, he pursued a PhD at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, under the supervision of Aaron Klug, researching the structure of tobacco mosaic virus protein. [6] [7] [8]
Upon finishing his PhD in 1970, Gilbert continued his research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology as a staff scientist. [9] During this time, Gilbert developed Simultaneous Iterative Reconstruction Technique (SIRT) – an iterative method for reconstructing the three-dimensional structure of objects from two-dimensional projections. [10] The original SIRT, as proposed by Gilbert, along with the family of variants that it spawned (known as SIRT-like), have widespread applications across medicine and biology, such as CT scans and cryo-EM. [11] [12] [13]
In 1974, Gilbert moved into the field of neuroscience, joining the laboratory of Sir John Eccles at the State University of New York, Buffalo as a visiting professor, where he investigated the neurophysiology of the monkey cerebellum. [14] Towards the end of 1974 and after completing his work in the Eccles laboratory, Gilbert partnered with Dr W. T. Thach at Yale School of Medicine. Over the next two years, and later, at Washington University School of Medicine, the pair carried out pioneering work on cerebellar motor learning. [4] By recording from the Purkinje cells of conscious monkeys learning a manual task, Gilbert and Thach tested and confirmed theoretical predictions [2] on motor learning in the cerebellum.
Besides his experimental work, Gilbert has produced a number of theories on cerebellar motor learning and has published his theories in Nature [3] and other journals. Since 2000, he has expanded his focus from the cerebellum to the entire brain; [15] he is currently devoting his time to producing a unifying theory of brain function.
Gilbert is the great-grandson of Sir Alfred Gilbert, the foremost member of the New Sculpture movement, and the nephew of Stephen Gilbert. He married twice and has four children.
A capsid is the protein shell of a virus, enclosing its genetic material. It consists of several oligomeric (repeating) structural subunits made of protein called protomers. The observable 3-dimensional morphological subunits, which may or may not correspond to individual proteins, are called capsomeres. The proteins making up the capsid are called capsid proteins or viral coat proteins (VCP). The capsid and inner genome is called the nucleocapsid.
Virology is the scientific study of biological viruses. It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host cells for reproduction, their interaction with host organism physiology and immunity, the diseases they cause, the techniques to isolate and culture them, and their use in research and therapy.
Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice.
Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) is a positive-sense single-stranded RNA virus species in the genus Tobamovirus that infects a wide range of plants, especially tobacco and other members of the family Solanaceae. The infection causes characteristic patterns, such as "mosaic"-like mottling and discoloration on the leaves. TMV was the first virus to be discovered. Although it was known from the late 19th century that a non-bacterial infectious disease was damaging tobacco crops, it was not until 1930 that the infectious agent was determined to be a virus. It is the first pathogen identified as a virus. The virus was crystallised by W.M. Stanley. It has a similar size to the largest synthetic molecule, known as PG5.
Sir Aaron Klug was a British biophysicist and chemist. He was a winner of the 1982 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.
Obaid Siddiqi FRS was an Indian National Research Professor and the Founder-Director of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) National Center for Biological Sciences. He made seminal contributions to the field of behavioural neurogenetics using the genetics and neurobiology of Drosophila.
Filamentous bacteriophages are a family of viruses (Inoviridae) that infect bacteria, or bacteriophages. They are named for their filamentous shape, a worm-like chain, about 6 nm in diameter and about 1000-2000 nm long. This distinctive shape reflects their method of replication: the coat of the virion comprises five types of viral protein, which are located in the inner membrane of the host bacterium during phage assembly, and these proteins are added to the nascent virion's DNA as it is extruded through the membrane. The simplicity of filamentous phages makes them an appealing model organism for research in molecular biology, and they have also shown promise as tools in nanotechnology and immunology.
Brome mosaic virus (BMV) is a small, positive-stranded, icosahedral RNA plant virus belonging to the genus Bromovirus, family Bromoviridae, in the Alphavirus-like superfamily.
The Semliki Forest virus is an alphavirus found in central, eastern, and southern Africa. It was first isolated from mosquitoes in the Semliki Forest, Uganda by the Uganda Virus Research Institute in 1942 and described by Smithburn and Haddow. It is known to cause disease in animals including humans.
The Journal of Molecular Biology is a biweekly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of molecular biology. It was established in 1959 and is published by Elsevier. The editor-in-chief is Peter Wright.
Michael G. Rossmann was a German-American physicist, microbiologist, and Hanley Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences at Purdue University who led a team of researchers to be the first to map the structure of a human common cold virus to an atomic level. He also discovered the Rossmann fold protein motif. His most well recognised contribution to structural biology is the development of a phasing technique named molecular replacement, which has led to about three quarters of depositions in the Protein Data Bank.
Frederic Middlebrook Richards, commonly referred to as Fred Richards, was an American biochemist and biophysicist known for solving the pioneering crystal structure of the ribonuclease S enzyme in 1967 and for defining the concept of solvent-accessible surface. He contributed many key experimental and theoretical results and developed new methods, garnering over 20,000 journal citations in several quite distinct research areas. In addition to the protein crystallography and biochemistry of ribonuclease S, these included solvent accessibility and internal packing of proteins, the first side-chain rotamer library, high-pressure crystallography, new types of chemical tags such as biotin/avidin, the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) chemical shift index, and structural and biophysical characterization of the effects of mutations.
Donald L. D. Caspar was an American structural biologist known for his works on the structures of biological molecules, particularly of the tobacco mosaic virus. He was an emeritus professor of biological science at the Institute of Molecular Biophysics, Florida State University, and an emeritus professor of biology at the Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center, Brandeis University. He has made significant scientific contributions in virus biology, X-ray, neutron and electron diffraction, and protein plasticity.
David S. Goodsell, is an associate professor at the Scripps Research Institute and research professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey. He is especially known for his watercolor paintings of cell interiors.
The term macromolecular assembly (MA) refers to massive chemical structures such as viruses and non-biologic nanoparticles, cellular organelles and membranes and ribosomes, etc. that are complex mixtures of polypeptide, polynucleotide, polysaccharide or other polymeric macromolecules. They are generally of more than one of these types, and the mixtures are defined spatially, and with regard to their underlying chemical composition and structure. Macromolecules are found in living and nonliving things, and are composed of many hundreds or thousands of atoms held together by covalent bonds; they are often characterized by repeating units. Assemblies of these can likewise be biologic or non-biologic, though the MA term is more commonly applied in biology, and the term supramolecular assembly is more often applied in non-biologic contexts. MAs of macromolecules are held in their defined forms by non-covalent intermolecular interactions, and can be in either non-repeating structures, or in repeating linear, circular, spiral, or other patterns. The process by which MAs are formed has been termed molecular self-assembly, a term especially applied in non-biologic contexts. A wide variety of physical/biophysical, chemical/biochemical, and computational methods exist for the study of MA; given the scale of MAs, efforts to elaborate their composition and structure and discern mechanisms underlying their functions are at the forefront of modern structure science.
Stephen Anthony Cusack FRS is the former Head of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) site in Grenoble, France.
William Charles Earnshaw is Professor of Chromosome Dynamics at the University of Edinburgh where he has been a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow since 1996.
Hanah Margalit is a Professor in the faculty of medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her research combines bioinformatics, computational biology and systems biology, specifically in the fields of gene regulation in bacteria and eukaryotes.
Timothy John Richmond is an American molecular biologist, biochemist, and biophysicist.
Gérard Marie Robert Bricogne is a French biophysicist and crystallographer.
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