MGY200: People (Post-Midterm)

Sydney Brenner

Used C. elegans to study the nervous system, mutating the worms in EMS to generate point mutations, found that F2 mutated worms had many phenotypes, including Sma (small), Lon (long), Dpy (dumpy), Unc (uncoordinated), Rol (roller), Vab (variably abnormal), and Bli (blistered), and was able to figure out their locations

Joe Culotti

Was interested in researching the development and function of the nervous system, so he studied three very similar Unc mutants: unc-40, unc-5, and unc-6 and used WGS on unc-5 to figure out if they were in the same biochemical pathway

Michael Klass

Was studying c. elegans and he was the first person to find/isolate the first mutant worm strain that lived longer than expected by treating a DH26 starter worm (which has a temperature-sensitive mutation in fer-15) with EMS mutagen

Tom Johnson

Identified the age-1 gene, which, when mutated, more than doubled the life of C. elegans

Cynthia Kenyon

Use a temperature-sensitive mutant in a gene called daf-2, found that daf-2 mutants entered the dauer instead of continuing to grow past the L2 (larval 2) growth stage, found an epistatic interaction, and noticed that when daf-2(null) = long life, when daf-16(null) = short life, but when daf-16(null); daf-2(null) = short life

Sir Archibald Garrod

Known as “the father of precision medicine" and was the first to link disease to Mendel’s laws of inheritance; after noticing that an infant patient's urine turned black, he proposed the idea of “inborn errors of metabolism,” in reference to the disorders alkaptonuria, pentosuria, cystinuria and albinism, believing that these disorders were caused by incorrect or missing steps in the body’s chemical pathways

Roth Lab

"They generated (almost) every possible nucleotide change in the CBS gene and measured the fitness (growth) of yeast cells containing each variant (10 469 variants with 551 amino acids and 19 possible changes)

and tested if synonymous variants and nonsense variants have a different effect on yeast growth"

Francis Galton

Was Charles Darwin’s cousin and was known as the first person to coin the term “eugenics,” which was the idea that human populations could be “improved” by selective breeding

R.A. Fisher

Was known as one of the fathers of modern synthesis and showed that a large number of Mendelian factors, each with a small effect on its own, can lead to an approximately normal distribution

Stephen Scherer

His lab identified copy-number variation as a type of pervasive variation and found that CNVs affect 10x more polymorphic base pairs than SNVs, and that 5–10% of the human genome contributes to CNVs

John Morris

His lab studied how genetic variation across the human genome affects osteoporosis to find the GWAS variants that are causally linked to the phenotype; he also used two independent fine-mapping methods to increase confidence, which arrowed each locus from potentially dozens of candidates to 2–5 high-probability SNPs

Akshamsaddin

A Turkish scientist in the 1400s that claimed that diseases, like plants and animals, have “invisible seeds”

Robert Hooke

In 1665, he developed the first compound microscope, observed the first eukaryote, and coined the term “cell”

Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

In 1676, he discovered microbes using his new microscope design and sampled them from tooth plaque

Francesco Redi

In 1688, he showed that flies do not spontaneously generate by taking three jars with meet, one open, one sealed, and one covered in gauze; maggots appeared on the meat in the open jar, but not in the other two, disapproving spontaneous generation

Louis Pasteur

In 1861, he showed that microbes did not grow in liquid until introduced from outside, and that even with air, non-life cannot create life; he did so by creating a special swan-neck flask that was curved but had a tiny section exposed to the air and found that compared to an open neck flask, microbes would not appear in the boiled liquid since they would be trapped in the bottleneck

Agostino Bassi

In 1835, he exposed healthy silkworms to a specific fungus, and found that they developed muscardine disease; unexposed silkworms did not, proving that exposure to the microbe = disease, no exposure = no disease

Robert Koch

In 1876, he isolated Bacillus anthracis from infected animals, grew it in pure culture outside the host, inoculated healthy animals (which then developed anthrax) and re-isolated the same organism, proving that the microbe alone is sufficient to cause the disease, even when removed from the original host; he also came up with four postulates based on those observations

Edward Jenner

He discovered the first vaccine in the late 1700s when he noticed that milkmaids tended to be immune to smallpox since they worked closely with cattle and contracted cowpox, so he took pus from cowpox blister on the hand of a milkmaid and applied to the scratch made on a young boy’s arm; six weeks later, took pus from a smallpox blister and put it on his arm, and found that the boy didn’t develop smallpox

Albert Alexander

A police constable who was injured by shrapnel in WW2 developing an infection from Staph and Strep and was the first person to be treated with penicillin, who showed recovery but died when they ran out of penicillin when his infection relapsed

Paul Ehrlich

He coined the term “chemotherapy” and the concept of a “magic bullet” and developed trypan red, a dye active against trypanosomes in mice, to treat HAT, then began modifying the arsenical Atoxyl to improve its safety

Erich Hoffman

He noticed trypanosomes in HAT resembled spirochetes, suggesting Ehrlich redirect to syphilis, a disease known as the “great pox” to find a treatment

Alfred Bertheim

He synthesized over 900 arsenic-based compounds and tested compound 606 against trypanosomes in 1907 and set aside as ineffective

Sahachiro Hata

He retested 606 (Salvarsan) in rabbits and found that no live bacteria the next day and chancres gone within 3 weeks

Alexander Fleming

Discovered penicillin in 1928 after noticing that there was a zone of inhibition after leaving a contaminated staph plate, summarizing that the mold must have something that killed bacteria, but couldn't figure out how to purify it

Florey and Chain

In the 1940s, they discovered Fleming's research and purified penicillin and showed that it cleared bacterial infections in mice

Selman Waksman

Discovered that microbes in soil produce compounds to kill competing microbes, did a systematic screening of actinomycetes (the soil bacteria) and discovered streptomycin from Streptomyces griseus, the first effective treatment for tuberculosis

Leon Jacobson

Showed that if the spleen of a mouse was protected the mouse could survive the otherwise lethal dose of radiation that would kill the mouse in about 8 days

Egon Lorenz

Showed that rescue could occur by transplanting bone marrow and that survival was better than in the spleen study

Charles Ford

Used chromosomal markers to track the genetic origin of the blood cells in the recipient and found that it was a mixture of the recipients and the donors

Till and McCulloch

Established the properties of stem cells, suggesting that the existence of self-renewing cells that could specialize for a wide variety of purposes; through the use of karyotyping, they obtained evidence that some of the cells in the nodule were capable of self-renewal

Lou Siminovitch

Figured whether the cells within the nodules were capable of self-renewal, finding that cells that gave rise to colonies had, among their descendants, cells that could themselves give rise to new colonies

Martin and Evans

Were the first to isolate stem cells from the epiblast after discovering that chimeric mice could be generating by using stem cells through the ES cell line from the donor epiblast and putting it into the blastocyst of another mice, demonstrating the potential and transformation of ES cells

Janet Rossant

Isolated trophoblast stem cells from the trophectoderm in 1998 and extra-embryonic endoderm (xen) cell lines from the primitive endoderm in 2005

Shinya Yamanaka

In 2006, he figured out how to transform regular mouse cells to become stem cells by transgenically expression a specific combination of transcription factors, creating induced pluripotent stem cells (iPCs or iPS cells), and in 2007, he did the same with human cells

John Dick

He discovered the the stem cell origin of cancer in 2022 by studying how stem cells contribute to the hematopoietic (blood) lineage and what relation this has to leukemia (blood cancers) and determined that stem cells where the root of many cancers

Boone and Andrews

They worked to build a large-scale map of the genetic interactions in budding yeast, which had ~6,000 genes, ~1,000 essential genes, and an array of ~5,000 viable haploid deletion mutants by conducting an SGA, scoring the SGA by measuring # of mutants # of colonies/plate, and finding some genes that grew well as a single mutant, but grew poorly when combined with the query strain mutation

Stanley Fields

Revolutionized the yeast-two-hybrid assay genetic system to detect protein-protein interactions, which segregates transcriptional factors in eukaryotes into a DNA Binding Domain (DBD) and an Activation Domain (AD)

Don Riddle

He identified two classes of dauer mutants: Daf-c (dauer-formation constitutive) and Daf-d (dauer-formation defective) mutants