Victoria Lundblad | |
|---|---|
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| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | UC Berkeley Harvard University |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Genetics |
| Institutions | Salk Institute for Biological Studies |
Victoria Lundblad is an American geneticist whose work focuses on the genetic control of chromosome behavior in yeast. [1] Many of her discoveries have concerned telomerase, the RNA-containing enzyme that completes the ends of chromosomes. [1] She works at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. [2]
Victoria Lundblad was born in the Bay Area of California to a biochemist and a school teacher. [2] Vicki Lundblad was involved in science experiments as early as junior high school, testing whether skin emitted substances that repelled mosquitoes. [3] She then took up playing the cello and threw herself into music studies; arriving at University of California, Berkeley, [2] she meant to major in mathematics and music. [3] She narrowed it down to Mathematics, but later added Biology. [2]
She pursued graduate education in biology at Harvard University, where she became Nancy Kleckner's first graduate student. [2] At Harvard, she was excited by a lecture by Jack Szostak, Nobel laureate in 2016, about his work on telomeres with Elizabeth Blackburn. [3] She began a postdoctoral fellowship in 1983, working with Jack Szostak on yeast with a defective telomerase that underwent early senescence. [3] She continued her study of telomeres as a postdoctoral fellow in Elizabeth Blackburn's laboratory. In 1991, she joined the genetics department at Baylor College of Medicine. [2] In 2004, she moved to the Salk Institute. [2]
In 1989, Lundblad identified a gene named EST1 ("ever shorter telomeres") in which telomeres are lost, and found that EST1 encoded a regulatory subunit of telomerase. [3] Later, collaborating with Nobel laureate Tom Cech, she discovered the catalytic subunit of telomerase and identified it as a reverse transcriptase with associated RNA. [2]
In 2017, three women full professors at the Salk Institute filed gender discrimination suits against the institute, pointing out that research funding was not distributed fairly, that only 13% of the research staff were women, and that of the five smallest laboratory spaces, four were assigned to women, among other problems. [4] Salk Institute responded that Lundblad was "consistently ranking below her peers in producing high quality research and attracting" grant support and that each of the three professors ranked in "the bottom quartile of her peers". [4] Scientific colleagues across the country objected to this characterization of Lundblad, including Nobel laureate Carol Greider, whose work also concerns telomerase, and who said Lundblad was "one of the few icons in the field," and that "for me to read in a press release that she's somehow in the bottom quartile rang really poorly to me." [4] In August, 2018, Lundblad settled the lawsuit out of court with undisclosed remedies offered by the institute. [5]
In 2014 she was elected to the American Academy of Microbiology — one of 16 women out of the 88 new fellows that year. [6]
Nugent CI, Hughes TR, Lue NF, Lundblad V.(1996) "Cdc13p: a single-strand telomeric DNA-binding protein with a dual role in yeast telomere maintenance." Science274(5285):249-52.
Lundblad V, Wright WE. (1996) "Telomeres and telomerase: a simple picture becomes complex." Cell87(3):369-75.
Virta-Pearlman V, Morris DK, Lundblad V. (1996) "Est1 has the properties of a single-stranded telomere end-binding protein." Genes Dev.10(24):3094-104.
Lendvay TS, Morris DK, Sah J, Balasubramanian B, Lundblad V. (1996) "Senescence mutants of Saccharomyces cerevisiae with a defect in telomere replication identify three additional EST genes." Genetics144(4):1399-412.
Linger J, Hughes TR, Shevchenko A, Mann M, Lundblad V, Cech TR. )1997) "Reverse transcriptase motifs in the catalytic subunit of telomerase." Science. 276(5312):561-7.
A telomere is a region of repetitive nucleotide sequences associated with specialized proteins at the ends of linear chromosomes. Telomeres are a widespread genetic feature most commonly found in eukaryotes. In most, if not all species possessing them, they protect the terminal regions of chromosomal DNA from progressive degradation and ensure the integrity of linear chromosomes by preventing DNA repair systems from mistaking the very ends of the DNA strand for a double-strand break.
The Salk Institute for Biological Studies is a scientific research institute located in the La Jolla community of San Diego, California, U.S. The independent, non-profit institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine; among the founding consultants were Jacob Bronowski and Francis Crick. Construction of the research facilities began in spring of 1962. The Salk Institute consistently ranks among the top institutions in the US in terms of research output and quality in the life sciences. In 2004, the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked Salk as the world's top biomedicine research institute, and in 2009 it was ranked number one globally by ScienceWatch in the neuroscience and behavior areas.
Telomerase, also called terminal transferase, is a ribonucleoprotein that adds a species-dependent telomere repeat sequence to the 3' end of telomeres. A telomere is a region of repetitive sequences at each end of the chromosomes of most eukaryotes. Telomeres protect the end of the chromosome from DNA damage or from fusion with neighbouring chromosomes. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster lacks telomerase, but instead uses retrotransposons to maintain telomeres.
Elizabeth Helen Blackburn, is an Australian-American Nobel laureate who is the former president of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. 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.
Thomas Robert Cech is an American chemist who shared the 1989 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Sidney Altman, for their discovery of the catalytic properties of RNA. Cech discovered that RNA could itself cut strands of RNA, suggesting that life might have started as RNAand he find out RNA can not only transmit instructions, but also that it can speed up the necessery reactions. He also studied telomeres, and his lab discovered an enzyme, TERT, which is part of the process of restoring telomeres after they are shortened during cell division. As president of Howard Hughes Medical Institute, he promoted science education, and he teaches an undergraduate chemistry course at the University of Colorado.
Dyskeratosis congenita (DKC), also known as Zinsser-Engman-Cole syndrome, is a rare progressive congenital disorder with a highly variable phenotype. The entity was classically defined by the triad of abnormal skin pigmentation, nail dystrophy, and leukoplakia of the oral mucosa, and MDS/AML, but these components do not always occur. DKC is characterized by short telomeres. Some of the manifestations resemble premature ageing and cognitive impairment can be a feature. The disease initially mainly affects the skin, but a major consequence is progressive bone marrow failure which occurs in over 80%, causing early mortality.
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.
Telomerase reverse transcriptase is a catalytic subunit of the enzyme telomerase, which, together with the telomerase RNA component (TERC), comprises the most important unit of the telomerase complex.
Jack William Szostak is a Canadian American biologist of Polish British descent, Nobel Prize laureate, university professor at the University of Chicago, former Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School, and Alexander Rich Distinguished Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. Szostak has made significant contributions to the field of genetics. His achievement helped scientists to map the location of genes in mammals and to develop techniques for manipulating genes. His research findings in this area are also instrumental to the Human Genome Project. He was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.
Telomerase RNA component, also known as TR, TER or TERC, is an ncRNA found in eukaryotes that is a component of telomerase, the enzyme used to extend telomeres. TERC serves as a template for telomere replication by telomerase. Telomerase RNAs differ greatly in sequence and structure between vertebrates, ciliates and yeasts, but they share a 5' pseudoknot structure close to the template sequence. The vertebrate telomerase RNAs have a 3' H/ACA snoRNA-like domain.
Protection of telomeres protein 1 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the POT1 gene.
PIN2/TERF1-interacting telomerase inhibitor 1, also known as PINX1, is a human gene. PINX1 is also known as PIN2 interacting protein 1. PINX1 is a telomerase inhibitor and a possible tumor suppressor.
Virginia Zakian is the Harry C. Wiess Professor in the Life Sciences in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She is the director of the Zakian Lab, which has done important research in topics such as telomere-binding protein, telomere recombination, and telomere position effects, at Princeton University. She is a fellow at the American Academy of Microbiology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science., and is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2018). Zakian served as the chair of "Princeton's Task force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering at Princeton" from 2001-2003, in 2003 Zakian became Princeton University's representative to Nine Universities, Gender Equity Analysis She was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019.
Shelterin is a protein complex known to protect telomeres in many eukaryotes from DNA repair mechanisms, as well as to regulate telomerase activity. In mammals and other vertebrates, telomeric DNA consists of repeating double-stranded 5'-TTAGGG-3' (G-strand) sequences along with the 3'-AATCCC-5' (C-strand) complement, ending with a 50-400 nucleotide 3' (G-strand) overhang. Much of the final double-stranded portion of the telomere forms a T-loop (Telomere-loop) that is invaded by the 3' (G-strand) overhang to form a small D-loop (Displacement-loop).
Inder Mohan Verma is an Indian American molecular biologist, the former Cancer Society Professor of Molecular Biology in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California, San Diego. He is recognized for seminal discoveries in the fields of cancer, immunology, and gene therapy.
Titia de Lange is the Director of the Anderson Center for Cancer Research, the Leon Hess professor and the head of Laboratory Cell Biology and Genetics at Rockefeller University.
María Antonia Blasco Marhuenda, known as María Blasco, is a Spanish molecular biologist. She is the current director of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre.
Bryant Villeponteau is an American scientist, entrepreneur, and longevity expert who has worked in both academia and industry.
Nancy Kleckner is the Herchel Smith Professor of Molecular Biology at Harvard University and principal investigator at the Kleckner Laboratory at Harvard University.
Telomeres, the caps on the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, play critical roles in cellular aging and cancer. An important facet to how telomeres function in these roles is their involvement in cell cycle regulation.
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