Roger Brent

Roger Brent
Roger Brent in his Lab at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center
Born December 28, 1955
Spartanburg, South Carolina
Residence United States
Citizenship United States
Fields Biologist
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Regulation of the cellular response to DNA damage (1982)
Known for Domain structure of transcription regulators, systems biology

Roger Brent (born December 28, 1955) is an American biologist known for his work on gene regulation and systems biology. He studies the quantitative behaviors of cell signaling systems and the origins and consequences of variation in them. He is a researcher at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Early life

Brent grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and received his BA in Computer Science and Statistics from the University of Southern Mississippi, where he applied AI techniques to protein folding. He performed PhD (1982)[1] and postdoctoral work (1985) in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University in the laboratory of Mark Ptashne. In work there he cloned the E. coli LexA repressor and showed how it controlled the cell's response to DNA damage, used LexA as a repressor in yeast,[2][3] and created fusion proteins that used LexA to bring portions of yeast Gal4 and other transcription regulatory proteins to synthetic reporter genes in yeast.[4] These domain swap experiments established the domain structure of eukaryotic transcription regulatory proteins.[5][6][7][8]

Career

Use of prokaryotic repressor proteins and domains in eukaryotes to regulate gene expression was the subject of basic patents granted in the US, Europe, and Japan: Brent, R. and Ptashne, M. "Regulation of eukaryotic gene expression." 1989. US Patent 4,833,080 is the key patent. Dr. Brent is the inventor on eleven US patents. Use of prokaryotic binding proteins, and construction of chimeric proteins containing transcription regulatory domains enabled identification of other transcription regulatory domains[9] and gene regulatory technologies including tetracycline-repressor controlled transcriptional silencing[10] and the Gal4 and LexA UAS systems used in other model organisms.[11]

In 1985, Brent moved to the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His work there contributed to two-hybrid methods and to development of large scale/ general purpose functional genomic means to detect and disrupt protein-protein interactions.[12] In 1997, with Sydney Brenner he helped establish the Molecular Sciences Institute,[13] a nonprofit research laboratory in Berkeley, California, and became its CEO,[14] research director and president in 2001. He initiated his lab's studies on cell signal control and cell-to-cell variation there. He is now a Full Member of the Division of Basic Sciences at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and an Affiliate Professor of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington.

Brent's work pursues two main questions: how signaling systems control their signals and the information in it[15][16] and the origins and phenotypic consequences of cell-to-cell variation in signaling and subsequent responses.[17]

In 1987, Brent help found, and continues to contribute to, Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, a "how to clone it manual"[18] which started the Current Protocols journals. From 1995 to 2000 he organized the "After the Genome" workshops in Santa Fe, whose content contributed to some of the early systems biology agenda.[19] In addition to customary advisory work with NIH, NSF, and industrial organizations, in 1997 he began to advise the US government on tactical and strategic considerations for defense against biological attack and emerging diseases.[20][21][22][23] In 1998, at the Molecular Sciences Institute, he participated in discussions with Rob Carlson and Drew Endy that helped develop some of the ideas underpinning synthetic biology.[24] From 2011 to 2014 he directed the Center for Biological Futures, an experimental effort to better understand the impacts of advances in biological knowledge and capability on human affairs.[25]

He has been a scholar of The Pew Charitable Trusts[26] and a senior scholar of the Ellison Foundation.[27] In 2003 he shared the Gabbay Award in biotechnology and medicine for his work on protein interaction methods,[28] and in 2011 he was named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science "for outstanding contributions in the area of biochemistry, transcription, genomics, and systems biology."[29]

Personal

Brent is married to scientist and Nobel Prize winner Linda B. Buck.

References

  1. ↑ "Regulation of the cellular response to DNA damage" (1982)
  2. ↑ Brent, Roger; Ptashne, Mark (1984). "A bacterial repressor protein or a yeast transcriptional terminator can block upstream activation of a yeast gene". Nature 312 (5995): 612–615. Bibcode:1984Natur.312..612B. doi:10.1038/312612a0.
  3. ↑ North, G. (1984). "Latterday lessons of lambda and lac.". Nature. 308 (5961) (Apr 19-25): 687–688. PMID 6232462.
  4. ↑ Brent, Roger; Ptashne, Mark (1985). "A eukaryotic transcriptional activator bearing the DNA specificity of a prokaryotic repressor". Cell 43: 729–736.
  5. ↑ Alberts, A.; Bray, D.; Lewis, J.; Raff, M.; Roberts, K. (1989). Molecular Biology of The Cell (6th ed.). Volume 1, Chapter 10: Garland Science. p. Figure 10–24, 568. ISBN 978-0815344322.
  6. ↑ Frankel, A. D.; Kim, P. S. (1991). "Modular Structure of Transcription Factors: Implications for Gene Regulation". Cell 65: 717–719. PMID 2040012.
  7. ↑ "Genetics". MIT Open Courseware. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved December 2014.
  8. ↑ Grotewold, E.; Kellogg, E.; Chappell, L (June 2015). Plant Genes, Genomes and Genetics (1st ed.). John Wiley and Sons. ISBN 978-1119998877.
  9. ↑ Godowski, P. J.; Picard, D.; Yamamoto, K. R. (August 1988). "Signal transduction and transcriptional regulation by glucocorticoid receptor-LexA fusion proteins". Science. 241 (4867): 812–816. PMID 3043662.
  10. ↑ Deuschle, U.; Meyer, W. K.; Thiesen, H. J. (April 1995). "Tetracycline-reversible silencing of eukaryotic promoters". Molecular Cell Biology. 15(4): 1907–1914. PMC 230416.
  11. ↑ Rodriguez, A. D. V,; Didaniol, D.; Desplan, C. (2012). "Power tools for gene expression and clonal analysis in Drosophila". Nature Methods 9: 47–55. PMID 22205518.
  12. ↑ Brent, Roger; Ptashne, Mark. "Regulation of eukaryotic gene expression US Patent 4,833,080 (1989)". Retrieved 6 January 2015.
  13. ↑ Friedberg, Errol (October 2010). Sydney Brenner: A Biography. CSHL Press. ISBN 0-87969-947-7.
  14. ↑ "Proteomics: Current State and Future Directions - An interview with Roger Brent, PhD". Retrieved July 2010.
  15. ↑ Yu, R.; Gordon, A.; Colman-Lerner, A.; Benjamin, K. R.; Pincus, D.; Serra, E.; Holl, M.; Brent, R. (2008). "Negative feedback optimizes information transmission in a cell signaling system". Nature 456: 755–761.
  16. ↑ Brent, R (2009). "What is the signal and what information does it carry?". FEBS Letters 583 (24): 4019–24. doi:10.1016/j.febslet.2009.11.029. PMID 19917282.
  17. ↑ Colman-Lerner, A.; Gordon, A.; Serra, E.; Holl, E.; Brent, R. (2005). "Regulated cell-to-cell variation in a cell fate decision system". Nature 437: 699–706.
  18. ↑ Ausubel, F. M.; Brent, R.; Kingston, R. E.; Moore, D. D.; Seidman, J. G.; Smith, J. A.; Struhl, K (2012). "Preface". Current Protocols in Molecular Biology. 98:111-v. doi:10.1002/0471142727.mbprefs98. ISBN 0471142727.
  19. ↑ Gruber, M. "Map the Genome, Hack the Genome". Wired.com. Retrieved 2 February 2010.
  20. ↑ Marshall, E. (1997). "Too radical for NIH? Try DARPA". Science 275 (5301): 744–746. doi:10.1126/science.275.5301.744.
  21. ↑ Miller, J.; Broad, W. J.; Engelberg, S. (2001). Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0684871592.
  22. ↑ Bhattacharjee, Y. (2007). "Panel Provides Peer Review of Intelligence Research". Science 318: 1538.
  23. ↑ Brent, R. "In the valley of the shadow of death.". MIT synthetic biology archive. Retrieved 2 August 2008.
  24. ↑ Carlson, R et al. "BIO-IO Components and Design Tools". Retrieved 5 August 2010.
  25. ↑ Woodward, Kristin. "Center for biological futures to address challenges posed by explosion of biological knowledge in 21st century". Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Retrieved 6 January 2014.
  26. ↑ "Pew Scholars Program in the Bio-Medical Sciences". The PEW Charitable Trusts. Retrieved 10 October 2011.
  27. ↑ "HOME::Senior Scholar Award in Aging::2000::Stem Cells". The Ellison Medical Foundation. The Ellison Medical Foundation. Retrieved 8 August 2011.
  28. ↑ "PAST WINNERS 2003 "for their development of yeast two-hybrid and yeast mating interaction traps"". Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center. Brandeis University Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center. Retrieved 13 June 2012.
  29. ↑ Sausville, E. A. (2011). "Awards, Appointments, Announcements". J Natl Cancer Inst 103 (4): 295. doi:10.1093/jnci/djr038.