Lynne E. Maquat

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Lynne E. Maquat

Lynne Elizabeth Maquat (* 1952 ) is an American biochemist at the University of Rochester .

Life

Maquat earned a bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Connecticut in 1974 and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin – Madison . As a postdoctoral fellow , she worked at the McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research , also at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her own research group at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo , New York . At the University of Rochester she is now (as of 2015) Professor of Biochemistry and Biophysics and Professor of Oncology and Director of the Institute for RNA Biology.

Act

Maquat is concerned with the biology of the mRNA , in particular with how the cell deals with it if errors occur in the processing of the mRNA.

In 1980 Maquat was able to show for the first time that a genetic disorder in the splicing of pre-mRNA can be a cause of disease (namely β-thalassemia ). She then worked on the principles of nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD), a control mechanism that recognizes unwanted (premature) stop codons in the mRNA and prevents their expression as shortened proteins. NMD works both with genetic disorders and with errors that occur in the "normal operation" of the cell. Maquat and coworkers were able to show that the cell recognizes the stop codons based on the splicing sites in the pre-mRNA when the NMD is triggered. In 1994 she discovered that NMD only works on newly synthesized mRNA in humans. The work led to the identification of the exon junction complex (EJC, together with Melissa Moore , 2000), which regularly contains NMD components, and a novel template for protein synthesis , which was called the pioneer translation initiation complex . Further work dealt with an additional mechanism of mRNA degradation that is mediated by the Staufen protein (Staufen-mediated mRNA decay, SMD) and is both mechanistically linked to and competes with NMD, and with new meanings of the long, non-coding RNA segments and Alu sequences .

Awards (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Book of Members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (amacad.org); Retrieved March 25, 2015.
  2. ↑ Lynne E. Maquat at the National Academy of Sciences (nasonline.org); Retrieved March 25, 2015.
  3. ^ William C. Rose Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (asbmb.org); Retrieved March 25, 2015.
  4. ↑ Lynne E. Maquat at the Gairdner Foundation (gairdner.org); Retrieved March 25, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Maquat, Lynne E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Maquat, Lynne; Maquat, Lynne Elizabeth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American biochemist
DATE OF BIRTH 1952