James A. Lake

James Albert Lake (born August 10, 1941 in Kearney ) is an American evolutionary biologist and molecular biologist.

Lake graduated from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1963 and a PhD in physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1967 . His dissertation was on the structure of transfer RNA. As a post-doctoral student in molecular biology, he was at MIT and at Harvard Medical School (from 1968). From 1970 he was assistant professor at the chair for cell biology of George Palade at Rockefeller University , from 1973 associate professor at New York University Medical School and in 1976 professor for molecular biology at the University of California, Los Angeles(UCLA). There he is Distinguished Professor of Molecular, Cell and Developmental Biology (from 1996) and Human Genetics (from 2002).

Using genetic methods, he researches the family tree of life (New Animal Phylogeny), including the prokaryote precursors of the eukaryotes (see primal ancestor ), and provided genetic evidence for the endosymbiosis origin of the eukaryotes. In 2004 he discovered that the eukaryotic genome was created from the fusion of the genome of a eubacteria and an archa bacterium . He had already put forward a corresponding theory (eocyte hypothesis) about the origin of eukaryotes in archaebacteria in 1984. In 2009 he found evidence of endosymbiosis in prokaryotes in early family tree development (Gram-negative bacteria with double membrane from symbiosis of early actinobacteria and Clostridium).

In 2011 he received the Darwin Wallace Medal . He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London , the American Academy of Microbiology , the American Association for the Advancement of Science . In 1983 he became a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, and in 2012 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Fonts (selection)

• with E. Henderson, M. Oakes, MW Clark: Eocytes: A new ribosome structure indicates a kingdom with a close relationship to eukaryotes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 81, 1984, pp. 3786-3790.
• with R. Jain, MC Rivera: Horizontal gene transfer among genomes: the complexity hypothesis, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Volume 96, 1999, pp. 3801-3806
• with R. Jain, MC Rivera: Mix and Match in the Tree of Life, Science, Volume 283, 1999, pp. 2927-2928.
• with AB Simonson: The transorientation hypothesis for codon recognition during protein synthesis. Nature, Volume 416, 2002, pp. 281-285.
• with R. Jain, MC Rivera, JE Moore: Horizontal gene transfer accelerates, genome innovation and evolution, Molecular biology and evolution, Volume 20, 2003, pp. 1598-1602
• with MC Rivera: The ring of life provides evidence for a genome fusion origin of eukaryotes, Nature, Volume 431, 2004, pp. 152-155
• with AB Simonson, JA Servin, RG Skophammer, CW Herbold, MC Rivera: Decoding the genomic tree of life. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, Vol. 102, 2005, Suppl. 1, pp. 6608-6613
• Disappearing Act, Nature, Volume 446, 2007, p. 983.
• with RG Skophammer, JA Servin, CW Herbold: Evidence for a Gram Positive, Eubacterial Root of the Tree of Life, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 24, 2007, pp. 1761-1768.
• with Craig W. Herbold, Maria C. Rivera, Jacqueline A. Servin, Ryan G. Skophammer: Rooting the Tree of Life Using Nonubiquitous Genes, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 24, 2007, pp. 130-136.
• Reconstructing Evolutionary Graphs: 3D Parsimony. Molecular Biology and Evolution, Volume 25, 2008, pp. 1677-1682.
• with RG Skophammer, CW Herbold, JA Servin: Genome beginnings: Rooting the tree of life. Phil. Trans. Royal Soc., B, Volume 364, 2009, pp. 2177-2185
• Evidence for an early prokaryotic endosymbiosis, Nature, Volume 460, 2009, pp. 967-971.
• with MA Ragan, JO McInerney: The network of life: genome beginnings and evolution, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Volume 364, 2009, pp. 2169-2289.

Web links

• Lake Lab