 | This article relies too much on references to primary sources .(March 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
Arthur G. Hunt | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Professor and Scientist |
| Awards | Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2017) |
Arthur G. Hunt is an American plant and soils scientist [1] who is currently a professor at the University of Kentucky and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. [2]
He earned his B.S at University of Lowell in 1976 and his Ph.D at Brandeis University in 1982. [3]
His interests are mRNA 3' end formation and polyadenylation, and plant RNA processing. [1] His highest cited paper is "Design and construction of a versatile system for the expression of foreign genes in plants" [4] at 355 times, according to Google Scholar. [5]
Hunt was named Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 2017 "in recognition of their contributions to science and technology, scientific leadership and extraordinary achievements across disciplines." [6]
Bonnie Lynn Bassler is an American molecular biologist who has researched chemical communication between bacteria known as quorum sensing, and contributed to the idea that disruption of chemical signaling can be used as an antimicrobial therapy. She is the Squibb Professor in Molecular Biology and chair of the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. She is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator and her research focuses on cell-to-cell communication in bacteria.
A microRNA is a small non-coding RNA molecule found in plants, animals and some viruses, that functions in RNA silencing and post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression. miRNAs function via base-pairing with complementary sequences within mRNA molecules. As a result, these mRNA molecules are silenced, by one or more of the following processes: (1) Cleavage of the mRNA strand into two pieces, (2) Destabilization of the mRNA through shortening of its poly(A) tail, and (3) Less efficient translation of the mRNA into proteins by ribosomes.
Gene expression is the process by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product. These products are often proteins, but in non-protein coding genes such as transfer RNA (tRNA) or small nuclear RNA (snRNA) genes, the product is a functional RNA. Gene expression is summarized in the Central Dogma first formulated by Francis Crick in 1958, further developed in his 1970 article, and expanded by the subsequent discoveries of reverse transcription and RNA replication.
Transcription is the first of several steps of DNA based gene expression, in which a particular segment of DNA is copied into RNA by the enzyme RNA polymerase. Both DNA and RNA are nucleic acids, which use base pairs of nucleotides as a complementary language. During transcription, a DNA sequence is read by an RNA polymerase, which produces a complementary, antiparallel RNA strand called a primary transcript.
Alternative splicing, or alternative RNA splicing, or differential splicing, is a regulated process during gene expression that results in a single gene coding for multiple proteins. In this process, particular exons of a gene may be included within or excluded from the final, processed messenger RNA (mRNA) produced from that gene. Consequently, the proteins translated from alternatively spliced mRNAs will contain differences in their amino acid sequence and, often, in their biological functions. Notably, alternative splicing allows the human genome to direct the synthesis of many more proteins than would be expected from its 20,000 protein-coding genes.
In molecular genetics, the three prime untranslated region (3'-UTR) is the section of messenger RNA (mRNA) that immediately follows the translation termination codon. The 3'-UTR often contains regulatory regions that post-transcriptionally influence gene expression.
Regulation of gene expression, or gene regulation, includes a wide range of mechanisms that are used by cells to increase or decrease the production of specific gene products. Sophisticated programs of gene expression are widely observed in biology, for example to trigger developmental pathways, respond to environmental stimuli, or adapt to new food sources. Virtually any step of gene expression can be modulated, from transcriptional initiation, to RNA processing, and to the post-translational modification of a protein. Often, one gene regulator controls another, and so on, in a gene regulatory network.
Polyadenylation is the addition of a poly(A) tail to a messenger RNA. The poly(A) tail consists of multiple adenosine monophosphates; in other words, it is a stretch of RNA that has only adenine bases. In eukaryotes, polyadenylation is part of the process that produces mature messenger RNA (mRNA) for translation. It, therefore, forms part of the larger process of gene expression.
Claire M. Fraser is an American genome scientist and microbiologist who has worked in microbial genomics and genome medicine. Her research has contributed to the understanding of the diversity and evolution of microbial life. Fraser is the director of the Institute for Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, MD, where she holds the Dean's Endowed Professorship in the School of Medicine. She has joint faculty appointments at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in the Departments of Medicine and Microbiology/Immunology. In 2019, she began serving a one-year term as President-Elect for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which will be followed by a one-year term as AAAS president starting in February 2020 and a one-year term as chair of the Board of Directors in February 2021.
Sir David Charles Baulcombe is a British plant scientist and geneticist. As of 2017 he is a Royal Society Research Professor and Regius Professor of Botany in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge.
Gerald Mayer Rubin is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the Drosophila melanogaster genome. Related to his genomics work, Rubin's lab is notable for development of genetic and genomics tools and studies of signal transduction and gene regulation. Rubin also serves as a Vice President of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Executive Director of the Janelia Research Campus.
Cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor subunit 3 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CPSF3 gene.
Cleavage and polyadenylation specificity factor subunit 4 is a protein that in humans is encoded by the CPSF4 gene.
In molecular cloning, a vector is a DNA molecule used as a vehicle to artificially carry foreign genetic material into another cell, where it can be replicated and/or expressed. A vector containing foreign DNA is termed recombinant DNA. The four major types of vectors are plasmids, viral vectors, cosmids, and artificial chromosomes. Of these, the most commonly used vectors are plasmids. Common to all engineered vectors are an origin of replication, a multicloning site, and a selectable marker.
Long non-coding RNAs are a type of RNA, defined as being transcripts with lengths exceeding 200 nucleotides that are not translated into protein. This somewhat arbitrary limit distinguishes long ncRNAs from small non-coding RNAs such as microRNAs (miRNAs), small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), Piwi-interacting RNAs (piRNAs), small nucleolar RNAs (snoRNAs), and other short RNAs. Long intervening/intergenic noncoding RNAs (lincRNAs) are sequences of lncRNA which do not overlap protein-coding genes.
RNA-Seq, also called RNA sequencing, is a particular technology-based sequencing technique which uses next-generation sequencing (NGS) to reveal the presence and quantity of RNA in a biological sample at a given moment, analyzing the continuously changing cellular transcriptome.
James Manley is Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Life Sciences at Columbia University, where his laboratory studies gene expression in mammalian cells. Manley and colleagues identified and characterized the key factors responsible for polyadenylation of mRNA precursors, and elucidated how this remarkably complex machinery functions in gene regulation, for example during cell growth and differentiation. He has also studied the mechanism and regulation of the process by which introns are removed from mRNA precursors, mRNA splicing. Manley and his coworkers codiscovered the first alternative splicing factor, characterized how this and other splicing regulatory proteins function and are themselves regulated, showed how alternative splicing can become deregulated in disease, and with respect to mechanism demonstrated that two spliceosomal small nuclear RNAs by themselves have catalytic activity. Finally, he elucidated unexpected links between these mRNA processing reactions and transcription, DNA damage signaling and maintenance of genomic stability. His work has thus provided considerable insight into the complex mechanisms that are essential for the regulated production of mRNAs in mammalian cells.
Zengjian Jeffrey Chen is a molecular geneticist and biologist, currently the D. J. Sibley Centennial Professor of Plant Molecular Genetics at University of Texas at Austin. Chen received his B.S. at Zhejiang Agricultural University, M.S. at Nanjing Agricultural University, and Ph.D. in Genetics at Texas A&M University. Following a postdoctoral position at University of Minnesota and as an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow at Washington University in St. Louis, he joined the faculty at Texas A&M in 1999, where he was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. In 2005, he moved to The University of Texas at Austin and became a Full Professor in 2008 in the Departments of Molecular Biosciences and Integrative Biology, Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and Institute for Cellular and Molecular Biology.
Michel Delseny is Director of Research Emeritus at the CNRS and a member of the French Academy of sciences.
Jian-Kang Zhu is a plant scientist, researcher and academic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Plant Biology at Purdue University and the Shanghai Center for Plant Stress Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). He is also the Academic Director of CAS Center of Excellence in Plant Sciences.