Clifford J. Tabin

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Clifford Tabin (Royal Society)

Clifford James Tabin (born January 19, 1954 in Glencoe , Illinois ) is an American geneticist at Harvard Medical School . He deals with the factors that control embryonic development and differentiation of organs and extremities .

Life

Tabin's father, Julius Tabin, was a postdoctoral fellow with Enrico Fermi as a physicist and worked on the Manhattan Project . His mother was a child psychologist at Northwestern University and later in her own practice.

Clifford Tabin earned a bachelor's degree in physics and anthropology from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in 1984 from Robert Allan Weinberg and David Baltimore at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). in biology . As a postdoctoral fellow, he worked with Doug Melton at Harvard University before setting up his own laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1985 . Tabin has been a faculty member at Harvard University since 1989 and has been director of the genetics department at Harvard Medical School since 2007.

Tabin is committed to establishing a medical faculty in Kathmandu , the capital of Nepal .

research

Developed at MIT Tabin one of the first retrovirus - vectors by murine leukemia virus altered genetically. He identified a point mutation that turns the G protein Ras into an oncogene . As a postdoc, he investigated the influence of the homeobox genes on the individual development ( ontogenesis ) of newts .

With his own working group, Tabin turned further to developmental biology and mainly used mice and chickens as model organisms . Using methods from experimental embryology , molecular biology and genetics, Tabin and co-workers are researching the fundamentals of how the development of external form and internal structure ( ontogenesis ) of vertebrates is controlled. In particular, the development of the extremities is the subject of research: how are the front and back ( anterior / posterior ), near and far from the body (proximal / distal) as well as ventral and backward (ventral / dorsal) determined? How does the differentiation work in tendons , muscles , joints and bones ? How is the asymmetry of the internal organs controlled.

Important research objects are the role of the Hedgehog signaling pathway in the formation of the extremities and the regulation of development by miRNAs . Tabin's research group was the first to describe Sonic hedgehog , one of the three hedgehog proteins known in mammals. More recent work deals with the evolutionary changes in ontogenetic programs (e.g. through gene regulation ) in jerboa , which have pronounced hind legs and sometimes only rudimentary forelegs, in cave fish whose eyes are stunted or in Darwin finches whose beaks have different shapes.

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Michael K. Richardson: Molecular tools, classic questions - an interview with Clifford Tabin. In: The International Journal of Developmental Biology. 53, 2009, pp. 725-731, doi: 10.1387 / ijdb.072575mr .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. a b Cliff Tabin ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at Harvard Medical School's Developmental & Regenerative Biology (harvard.edu); Retrieved March 17, 2013 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / drb.hms.harvard.edu
  2. a b NAS Award in Molecular Biology at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); accessed on January 14, 2016
  3. Clifford Tabin, Ph.D. ( Memento of October 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) at Children's Hospital Boston Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (IDDRC) (iddrc.org); accessed on March 16, 2013
  4. Book of Members 1780 – present, Chapter T. (PDF; 432 kB) In: American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org). Retrieved April 4, 2018 .
  5. Clifford J. Tabin at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); accessed on March 16, 2013
  6. ^ March of Dimes Prize in Developmental Biology. Previous recipients. ( Memento of February 13, 2009 in the Internet Archive )