Where: Building 9 Lecture hall 1
Credit: 1
Description
Lecture by Mark Ptashne, Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
ABOUT THIS LECTURE
Mark Ptashne had a good fortune, early on, to be gripped by a scientific problem, gene regulation, that had ramifications beyond what he imagined. Its unfoldings have kept him enthralled ever since. Mark and his team began with bacteria, and especially with bacteriophage λ, and then moved to work with yeast and mammalian cells. They always sought coherent descriptions, ideas that would apply to apparently disparate cases, regulation of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genes, for example, although the latter, but not the former, are sequestered in a nucleus and wrapped in nucleosomes. His goal is to put the various stages of understanding in an overarching context. He might not say anything that has not been told by others or himself, but he hopes that otherwise obscure connections and simplifications will be made clear. Where he refers to “we,” he, of course, means to include the crucial role of this or that student or postdoctoral fellow.
Session chaired by Christian Froekjaer-Jensen.
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Mark Ptashne
Mark Ptashne is a molecular biologist and the Ludwig Chair of Molecular Biology at Memorial Sloan–Kettering Cancer Center. Ptashne earned his PhD from Harvard in 1968, after which he joined the faculty of Harvard and became chair of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology in 1980. In 1997 he left Harvard for MSK. In 1997, he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. The focus of his scientific career has been gene regulation. Ptashne was the first scientist to demonstrate specific binding between protein and DNA, and his lifelong work has been the elucidation of how the yeast transcriptional activator Gal4 works. He was the originator of the "ball and stick" model of transcription factor function, demonstrating in bacteria and in yeast that they typically consist of separable regions that mediate DNA binding and interaction with transcriptional activators or repressors.
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