Terry Orr-Weaver | |
---|---|
Alma mater | Harvard University |
Known for | identification of genes for chromosome separation |
Awards | 2006 Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology 2006 National Academy of Sciences 2010 Fellow of American Association for Advancement of Science 2013 FASEB Excellence in Science Award 2018 Flexner Discovery Lecturer at Vanderbilt University |
Scientific career | |
Fields | genetics, developmental biology, cell biology |
Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Whitehead Institute |
Thesis | (1984) |
Doctoral advisor | Jack Szostak |
Terry L. Orr-Weaver is an American molecular biologist in the MIT Department of Biology with a joint appointment to the Whitehead Institute. She does research on developmental biology, with a focus on "[c]oordination of cell growth and division with development, with particular focus on the oocyte-to-embryo transition, control of cell size, and regulation of metazoan DNA replication." [1] Orr-Weaver and her collaborators have identified two proteins necessary for the proper sorting of chromosomes during meiosis with implications for cancer and birth defects. [2] In 2006 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. [2]
Terry Orr-Weaver received her PhD in biological chemistry in 1984 from Harvard University. [2] She was the first graduate student advised by Nobel laureate Jack Szostak in his career, and he discussed her research in his Nobel biography. [3]
Orr-Weaver was a faculty member at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and also at the Whitehead Institute, both of which she joined in 1987. [2] She became a Searle Scholar in 1988. [4] She was appointed an American Cancer Society Research Professor at MIT in 2008. [5] She served as the President of the Genetics Society of America in 2005, [6] and President of the National Drosophila Board in 2008. [5] In 2013 she received the FASEB Excellence in Science Award. [2]
Orr-Weaver's research concerns the cell cycle and delves into both normal and abnormal aspects of cell division regulation in such diseases as cancer and certain birth defects. She and her collaborators have particularly elucidated the way the cell cycle is coordinated with development. [2] They have shown that cortex protein specifically triggers the anaphase-promoting complex in ovaries and the degradation of cortex protein following egg-activation is strictly controlled. [7] They have also established that Inducer of Meiosis 4 (IME4) is required for an important step, Notch signaling, to occur in fruit fly ovaries. [8]
She is the co-author, with Harvey Lodish, of the book Model Organisms: Drosophila, published in 1997 by Academic Press. [9]
In cell biology, mitosis is a part of the cell cycle in which replicated chromosomes are separated into two new nuclei. Cell division by mitosis gives rise to genetically identical cells in which the total number of chromosomes is maintained. Therefore, mitosis is also known as equational division. In general, mitosis is preceded by S phase of interphase and is often followed by telophase and cytokinesis; which divides the cytoplasm, organelles and cell membrane of one cell into two new cells containing roughly equal shares of these cellular components. The different stages of mitosis altogether define the mitotic (M) phase of an animal cell cycle—the division of the mother cell into two daughter cells genetically identical to each other.
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.
David Baltimore is an American biologist, university administrator, and 1975 Nobel laureate in Physiology or Medicine. He is President Emeritus and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he served as president from 1997 to 2006. He also served as the director of the Joint Center for Translational Medicine, which joined Caltech and UCLA in a program to translate basic scientific discoveries into clinical realities. He also formerly served as president of Rockefeller University from 1990 to 1991, founder and director of the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research from 1982 to 1990, and was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007.
A couple of homologous chromosomes, or homologs, are a set of one maternal and one paternal chromosome that pair up with each other inside a cell during fertilization. Homologs have the same genes in the same loci where they provide points along each chromosome which enable a pair of chromosomes to align correctly with each other before separating during meiosis. This is the basis for Mendelian inheritance which characterizes inheritance patterns of genetic material from an organism to its offspring parent developmental cell at the given time and area.
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally independent entity from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where its 18 members all hold faculty appointments in the MIT Department of Biology or the MIT Department of Bioengineering. Two members are National Medal of Science recipients; ten have been elected to the National Academy of Sciences; and four have been elected to the National Academy of Medicine; six are Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators.
Endoreduplication is replication of the nuclear genome in the absence of mitosis, which leads to elevated nuclear gene content and polyploidy. Endoreplication can be understood simply as a variant form of the mitotic cell cycle (G1-S-G2-M) in which mitosis is circumvented entirely, due to modulation of cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) activity. Examples of endoreplication characterized in arthropod, mammalian, and plant species suggest that it is a universal developmental mechanism responsible for the differentiation and morphogenesis of cell types that fulfill an array of biological functions. While endoreplication is often limited to specific cell types in animals, it is considerably more widespread in plants, such that polyploidy can be detected in the majority of plant tissues.
William R. "Bill" Brinkley, was an American cellular biologist and scientific advocate and served as a Professor and Dean of the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences at Baylor College of Medicine. Brinkley was recognized particularly for contributing to discovery of the attachment of chromosomes to the mitotic spindle apparatus.
The Genetics Society of America (GSA) is a scholarly membership society of more than 5,500 genetics researchers and educators, established in 1931. The Society was formed from the reorganization of the Joint Genetics Sections of the American Society of Zoologists and the Botanical Society of America.
Angelika Amon was an Austrian American molecular and cell biologist, and the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Amon's research centered on how chromosomes are regulated, duplicated, and partitioned in the cell cycle. Amon was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.
Harvey Franklin Lodish is a molecular and cell biologist, professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Founding Member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and lead author of the textbook Molecular Cell Biology. Lodish's research focused on cell surface proteins and other important areas at the interface between molecular cell biology and medicine.
The meiotic recombination checkpoint monitors meiotic recombination during meiosis, and blocks the entry into metaphase I if recombination is not efficiently processed.
Gerald Ralph Fink is an American biologist, who was Director of the Whitehead Institute at MIT from 1990–2001. He graduated from Amherst College in 1962 and received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1965, having elucidated the histidine pathway in budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. After postdoctoral study at the National Institutes of Health with Bruce Ames on the regulation of the histidine operon of Salmonella, in 1967 he joined Cornell University where he became a Professor of Genetics and pursued the study of the HIS4 region of yeast. In 1982 he became a founding member of the Whitehead Institute and Professor of Genetics at MIT. Dr. Fink was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1981, to the Institute of Medicine in 1996, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2003.
Aviv Regev is a computational biologist and systems biologist and Executive Vice President and Head of Genentech Research and Early Development in Genentech/Roche. She is a core member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and professor at the Department of Biology of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Regev is a pioneer of single cell genomics and of computational and systems biology of gene regulatory circuits. She founded and leads the Human Cell Atlas project, together with Sarah Teichmann.
Synthesis-dependent strand annealing (SDSA) is a major mechanism of homology-directed repair of DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs). Although many of the features of SDSA were first suggested in 1976, the double-Holliday junction model proposed in 1983 was favored by many researchers. In 1994, studies of double-strand gap repair in Drosophila were found to be incompatible with the double-Holliday junction model, leading researchers to propose a model they called synthesis-dependent strand annealing. Subsequent studies of meiotic recombination in S. cerevisiae found that non-crossover products appear earlier than double-Holliday junctions or crossover products, challenging the previous notion that both crossover and non-crossover products are produced by double-Holliday junctions and leading the authors to propose that non-crossover products are generated through SDSA.
Jeffrey Connor Hall is an American geneticist and chronobiologist. Hall is Professor Emeritus of Biology at Brandeis University and currently resides in Cambridge, Maine.
Ruth Lehmann is a developmental and cell biologist. She is the Director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, succeeding David Page. She previously was affiliated with the New York University School of Medicine, where she was the Director of the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Professor of Cell Biology, and the Chair of the Department of Cell Biology. Her research focuses on germ cells and embryogenesis.
Abby F. Dernburg is a Professor of Cell and Developmental Biology at the University of California, Berkeley, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and a Faculty Senior Scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Anne Villeneuve is an American geneticist. She is known for her work on the mechanisms governing chromosome inheritance during sexual reproduction. Her work focuses on meiosis, the process by which a diploid organism, having two sets of chromosomes, produces gametes with only one set of chromosomes. She is a Professor of Developmental Biology and of Genetics at Stanford University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
R. Scott Hawley is an American geneticist and investigator at the Stowers Institute for Medical Research in Kansas City, Missouri, a member of the US National Academy of sciences and fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been President of the Genetics Society of America, and leads a research team focused on the molecular mechanisms that regulate chromosome behavior during meiosis.
Howard David Lipshitz is an American and Canadian biologist who does genetic research on the fruit fly, Drosophila.