Robert Mortimer (1927-2007) [1] was an American molecular biologist who was a pioneer of introducing single-celled yeasts as a model organism to study the operation of genes and chromosomes. [2]
Mortimer was a professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley. His service to the field was recognized with the George W. Beadle Award in 2002.
Mortimer died on August 10, 2007, in Berkeley, California at age 79. [3]
The University of California, Berkeley is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant university and the founding campus of the University of California system. Its fourteen colleges and schools offer over 350 degree programs and enroll some 32,000 undergraduate and 13,000 graduate students. Berkeley ranks among the world's top universities.
Susan Lee Lindquist, ForMemRS was an American professor of biology at MIT specializing in molecular biology, particularly the protein folding problem within a family of molecules known as heat-shock proteins, and prions. Lindquist was a member and former director of the Whitehead Institute and was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2010.
Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a species of yeast. The species has been instrumental in winemaking, baking, and brewing since ancient times. It is believed to have been originally isolated from the skin of grapes. It is one of the most intensively studied eukaryotic model organisms in molecular and cell biology, much like Escherichia coli as the model bacterium. It is the microorganism behind the most common type of fermentation. S. cerevisiae cells are round to ovoid, 5–10 μm in diameter. It reproduces by budding.
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.
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. Previously she was a biological researcher and professor of biology and physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, who studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects the chromosome. In 1984, Blackburn co-discovered telomerase, the enzyme that replenishes the telomere, with Carol W. Greider. For this work, she was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing it with Greider and Jack W. Szostak, becoming the first Australian woman Nobel laureate. She also worked in medical ethics, and was controversially dismissed from the Bush administration's President's Council on Bioethics.
Randy Wayne Schekman is an American cell biologist at the University of California, Berkeley, former editor-in-chief of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and former editor of Annual Review of Cell and Developmental Biology. In 2011, he was announced as the editor of eLife, a new high-profile open-access journal published by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Max Planck Society and the Wellcome Trust launching in 2012. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1992. Schekman shared the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with James Rothman and Thomas C. Südhof for their ground-breaking work on cell membrane vesicle trafficking.
Yeast display is a protein engineering technique that uses the expression of recombinant proteins incorporated into the cell wall of yeast for isolating and engineering antibodies.
Howard Kapnek Schachman was a graduate school professor in the Department of Molecular & Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
David Andrew Sinclair is an Australian biologist and academic known for his research on aging and epigenetics. Sinclair is a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and is the co-director of its Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research. He is an officer of the Order of Australia (AO).
Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020.
Carolyn Ruth Bertozzi is an American chemist and Nobel laureate, known for her wide-ranging work spanning both chemistry and biology. She coined the term "bioorthogonal chemistry" for chemical reactions compatible with living systems. Her recent efforts include synthesis of chemical tools to study cell surface sugars called glycans and how they affect diseases such as cancer, inflammation, and viral infections like COVID-19. At Stanford University, she holds the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professorship in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Bertozzi is also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) and is the former Director of the Molecular Foundry, a nanoscience research center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Drunken monkey hypothesis proposes that human attraction to ethanol may derive from dependence of the primate ancestors of Homo sapiens on ripe and fermenting fruit as a dominant food source. Ethanol naturally occurs in ripe and overripe fruit when yeasts ferment sugars, and consequently early primates have evolved a genetically based behavioral attraction to the molecule.
Daniel Edward Koshland Jr. was an American biochemist. He reorganized the study of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and was the editor of the leading U.S. science journal, Science, from 1985 to 1995. He was a Member of the United States National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society.
A protist is any eukaryotic organism that is not an animal, plant, or fungus. While it is likely that protists share a common ancestor, the exclusion of other eukaryotes means that protists do not form a natural group, or clade. Therefore, some protists may be more closely related to animals, plants, or fungi than they are to other protists. However, like the groups algae, invertebrates, and protozoans, the biological category protist is used for convenience. Others classify any unicellular eukaryotic microorganism as a protist. The study of protists is termed protistology.
Christopher J. Chang is a Professor of Chemistry and of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Class of 1942 Chair. Chang is also a member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, Adjunct Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of California, San Francisco, and Faculty Scientist at the Chemical Sciences Division of Lawrence Berkeley Lab. He is the recipient of several awards for his research in bioinorganic chemistry, molecular and chemical biology.
Erin K. O'Shea Ph.D. is President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In 2013, she was named HHMI's Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer. Prior to that, she was a Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University. In 2016, her appointment as future, and first woman, President of HHMI was announced. She has been a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator since 2000.
Fred Sherman was an American scientist who pioneered the use of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a model for studying the genetics, molecular biology, and biochemistry of eukaryotic cells. His research encompassed broad areas of yeast biology including gene expression, protein synthesis, messenger RNA processing, bioenergetics, and mechanisms of mutagenesis. He also contributed extensively to the genetics of the opportunistic pathogen Candida albicans.
Sabeeha Sabanali Merchant is a professor of plant biology at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the photosynthetic metabolism and metalloenzymes In 2010 Merchant led the team that sequenced the Chlamydomonas genome. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012.
Marla Beth Feller is the Paul Licht Distinguished Professor in Biological Sciences and Member of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies the mechanisms that underpin the assembly of neural circuits during development. Feller is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
David G. Drubin is an American biologist, academic, and researcher. He is a Distinguished Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley where he holds the Ernette Comby Chair in Microbiology.