Sir Shankar Balasubramanian | |
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Born | [1] | 30 September 1966
Nationality | British |
Alma mater | University of Cambridge |
Known for |
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Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Studies on the reaction mechanism of chorismate synthase (1992) |
Doctoral advisor | Chris Abell |
Doctoral students | Julian Huppert [3] [4] |
Website | www |
Sir Shankar Balasubramanian (born 30 September 1966) [1] is an Indian-born British chemist [5] [6] and Herchel Smith Professor [7] of Medicinal Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, [8] [9] Senior Group Leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute [10] and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. [11] He is recognised for his contributions in the field of nucleic acids. [12] He is scientific founder of Solexa [13] [14] and biomodal (formally Cambridge Epigenetix). [15] [16]
Born in Madras (now Chennai) India in 1966, [1] Shankar Balasubramanian moved to the UK with his parents in 1967. He grew up in a rural area just outside Runcorn, Cheshire, and attended Daresbury Primary School, then Appleton Hall High School (which has since amalgamated to form Bridgewater High School). He went on to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, where he did his undergraduate degree from 1985 to 1988 and continued with a PhD [17] for research on the reaction mechanism of the enzyme chorismate synthase supervised by Chris Abell (1988–1991). [18]
Following his PhD, Balasubramanian travelled to the United States as a SERC/NATO Research Fellow and worked in the group of Stephen J. Benkovic at Pennsylvania State University (1991–1993). [ citation needed ]
He began his independent academic career in 1994 at the University of Cambridge and has remained there ever since, first as College Lecturer, then University Lecturer (1998), University Reader in Chemical Biology (2003) and Professor of Chemical Biology (2007). He was most recently appointed Herchel Smith Professor of Medicinal Chemistry in 2008. [19]
He currently[ when? ] directs research laboratories in the Department of Chemistry [8] [9] and also the Cancer Research UK (CRUK) Cambridge Institute at the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. [10] His former doctoral students include Julian Huppert. [3] [4]
Balasubramanian works in the field of nucleic acids. His citation on election to the Royal Society reads:
Shankar Balasubramanian is an internationally recognised leader in the field of nucleic acids who is distinguished for pioneering contributions to chemistry and its application to the biological and medical sciences. He is a principal inventor of the leading next generation sequencing methodology, Solexa sequencing, that has made routine, accurate, low-cost sequencing of human genomes a reality and has revolutionised biology. He has made seminal contributions to the identification, elucidation and manipulation of non-coding genetic elements, particularly four-stranded structures called G-quadruplexes. His work on the intervention of nucleic acid function using small molecules has revealed a number of molecular mechanisms that can be exploited, e.g. to modulate the biology of cancer. [20]
More recently Balasubramanian has been inventing and applying new chemical methods to study epigenetic changes to DNA bases including single base resolution sequencing of 5-formylcytosine, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine and 5-methylcytosine. [21] [22] [23]
Honours and awards include:
Walter Gilbert is an American biochemist, physicist, molecular biology pioneer, and Nobel laureate.
Frederick Sanger was a British biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice.
Sir John Edward Sulston was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm Caenorhabditis elegans in 2002 with his colleagues Sydney Brenner and Robert Horvitz at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology. He was a leader in human genome research and Chair of the Institute for Science, Ethics and Innovation at the University of Manchester. Sulston was in favour of science in the public interest, such as free public access of scientific information and against the patenting of genes and the privatisation of genetic technologies.
Sir Gregory Paul Winter is a Nobel Prize-winning English molecular biologist best known for his work on the therapeutic use of monoclonal antibodies. His research career has been based almost entirely at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology and the MRC Centre for Protein Engineering, in Cambridge, England.
The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust.
In molecular biology, G-quadruplex secondary structures (G4) are formed in nucleic acids by sequences that are rich in guanine. They are helical in shape and contain guanine tetrads that can form from one, two or four strands. The unimolecular forms often occur naturally near the ends of the chromosomes, better known as the telomeric regions, and in transcriptional regulatory regions of multiple genes, both in microbes and across vertebrates including oncogenes in humans. Four guanine bases can associate through Hoogsteen hydrogen bonding to form a square planar structure called a guanine tetrad, and two or more guanine tetrads can stack on top of each other to form a G-quadruplex.
John Frederick William Birney is joint director of EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), in Hinxton, Cambridgeshire and deputy director general of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL). He also serves as non-executive director of Genomics England, chair of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) and honorary professor of bioinformatics at the University of Cambridge. Birney has made significant contributions to genomics, through his development of innovative bioinformatics and computational biology tools. He previously served as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute.
Steven Lloyd Salzberg is an American computational biologist and computer scientist who is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Computer Science, and Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University, where he is also Director of the Center for Computational Biology.
Richard Michael Durbin is a British computational biologist and Al-Kindi Professor of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. He also serves as an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Sanger Institute where he was previously a senior group leader.
Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a Professor of Bioinformatics at King's College London, Head of Genome Analysis at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. From 1 March 2024, Hubbard became the director of Europe's Life Science Data Infrastructure ELIXIR.
Michael Webster Bevan is a professor at the John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK.
Julian Parkhill is Professor of Bacterial Evolution in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He previously served as head of pathogen genomics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.
Sarah Amalia Teichmann is a German scientist, the former head of cellular genetics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and a visiting research group leader at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). She serves as director of research in the Cavendish Laboratory, Professor at the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Stem Cell Institute, and is a senior research fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Sir David Klenerman is a British biophysical chemist and a professor of biophysical chemistry at the Department of Chemistry at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge.
Tom Brown FRSC FRSE is a British chemist, biotechnologist, and entrepreneur. He is the Professor of Nucleic acid chemistry at the Department of Chemistry and Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. Currently, he is serving as the President of the Chemical Biology Interface Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He is best known for his contribution in the field of DNA Repair, DNA Click chemistry, and in the application of Molecular genetics in forensics and diagnostics.
Nigel Shaun Scrutton is a British biochemist and biotechnology innovator known for his work on enzyme catalysis, biophysics and synthetic biology. He is Director of the UK Future Biomanufacturing Research Hub, Director of the Fine and Speciality Chemicals Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SYNBIOCHEM), and Co-founder, Director and Chief Scientific Officer of the 'fuels-from-biology' company C3 Biotechnologies Ltd. He is Professor of Enzymology and Biophysical Chemistry in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Manchester. He is former Director of the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology (MIB).
Shantanu Chowdhury is an Indian structural biologist and a professor at Institute of Genomics and Integrative Biology of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research. He is known for developing a mechanism for gene regulation mediated by DNA Secondary-Structure in diverse cellular contexts. An elected fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, India, he is a recipient of the National Bioscience Award for Career Development of the Department of Biotechnology in 2010. 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 2012, for his contributions to biological sciences.
Julia Rose Gog is a British mathematician and professor of mathematical biology in the faculty of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. She is also a David N. Moore fellow, director of studies in mathematics at Queens' College, Cambridge and a member of both the Cambridge immunology network and the infectious diseases interdisciplinary research centre.
5-Formylcytosine (5fC) is a pyrimidine nitrogen base derived from cytosine. In the context of nucleic acid chemistry and biology, it is regarded as an epigenetic marker. Discovered in 2011 in mammalian embryonic stem cells by Thomas Carell's research group the modified nucleoside was more recently confirmed to be relevant both as an intermediate in the active demethylation pathway and as a standalone epigenetic marker. In mammals, 5fC is formed by oxidation of 5-Hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC) a reaction mediated by TET enzymes. Its molecular formula is C5H5N3O2.
Professor Stephen Neidle is a British X-ray crystallographer, chemist and drug designer working at the UCL School of Pharmacy. His area of scientific research has been in nucleic acid structure and recognition, and the research topic of quadruplexes.