Frederick M. Ausubel

Fred Ausubel

Frederick M Ausubel (born September 2, 1945) is an American molecular biologist and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School in Boston and is the Karl Winnacker Distinguished Investigator in the Department of Molecular Biology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston.,^[1] Massachusetts.

Education

Frederick M Ausubel obtained his undergraduate degree in 1966 at the University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Biology in 1972 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Research

Dr. Ausubel’s scientific work concerns host-microbe interactions. In the 1970s and 1980s, his laboratory worked on the molecular basis of symbiotic nitrogen fixation, the process by which legumes, in concert with a bacterial symbiont, convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Over the last 20 years, Dr. Ausubel's lab has pioneered the development of so-called multi-host pathogenesis^[2] systems that involve the infection of invertebrate hosts, including the well-studied nematode Caenorhabditis elegans and the reference plant Arabidopsis thaliana, with a variety of bacterial and fungal pathogens. His research helped elucidate the innate immune signaling pathways in these two model hosts and determined which aspects of the innate immune response are conserved and whether they derive by a process of divergent or convergent evolution.^[3] His laboratory currently use the C. elegans pathogenesis model to study intestinal epithelial immunity and how hosts distinguish pathogens from beneficial commensal microorganisms. Related work in his laboratory concerns the identification and characterization of low molecular weight compounds that specifically activate C. elegans immune signaling pathways. His laboratory pioneered and assembled an automated C. elegans sample preparation pipeline to enable high-throughput chemical screens using whole C. elegans animals based on automated image analysis.

As of 2013, Dr. Ausubel had published 215 refereed scientific articles. In addition to serving on a variety of editorial boards, Dr. Ausubel is founding editor of the widely-read Current Protocols in Molecular Biology^[4][5] Dr. Ausubel was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences^[6] in 1994,^[7] the American Academy of Microbiology in 2002 and also the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003.

Awards

Dr. Ausubel received the 2014, Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, for lifetime achievement in the field of genetics.^[8]

External links

• http://ausubellab.mgh.harvard.edu/
• http://chemicalbiology.mgh.harvard.edu/labs-ausubel.htm
• http://molbio.mgh.harvard.edu/laboratories/ausubel

References

1. ↑ http://ausubellab.mgh.harvard.edu/.  Missing or empty |title= (help)
2. ↑ Ausubel, Frederick (2012). Recent Advances on Model Hosts. Springer. p. Vol 710. ISBN 978-1-4419-5638-5. 
3. ↑ Ausubel, Frederick M.; Javier E. Irazoqui, Jonathan M. Urbach (2010). "Evolution of host innate defence: insights from Caenorhabditis elegans and primitive invertebrates". Nature Reviews Immunology 10: 47–58. PMID 20029447.  Cite uses deprecated parameters (help)
4. ↑ Current Protocols in Molecular Biology. Wiley. ISBN 9780471142720. 
5. ↑ Ausubel, Frederick (2002). Short Protocols in Molecular Biology, 5th Edition, 2 Volume Set. Wiley. ISBN 978-0-471-25092-0. 
6. ↑ National Academy of Sciences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_National_Academy_of_Sciences_(Plant_biology).  Missing or empty |title= (help)
7. ↑ "National Academy of Sciences". 
8. ↑ "The Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal". Genetics Society of America.