Articles by Sarah Webb (5 results)

Today it’s easy to take for granted that geneticists can identify a mutation, find its gene, and map it to the expressed protein. But just a few decades ago, this problem remained a thorny one. Welcome Bender of Harvard Medical School—with his work teasing out the function of the bithorax complex in Drosophila—made key advances…

Julie Ahringer has focused her career on understanding development and transcriptional regulation in Caenorhabditis elegans. Along the way her lab has built invaluable tools, including a genome-wide RNAi library, that have supported a huge range of discoveries across biology. In recognition of this work, Ahringer has been awarded the 2020 George W. Beadle Award from…

Fifteen years ago, Seth Bordenstein and a small group of colleagues started planning a series of lab experiences that would bring cutting edge genetics methods into biology classrooms. Because they worked on Wolbachia microbes that live in half of the world’s arthropod species, they centered the work on these bacterial parasites and started locally with…

When Bonnie Bassler was wrapping up her biochemistry PhD at Johns Hopkins University, she heard a research talk at a small conference in Baltimore that switched on a light and changed her career. A geneticist described how groups of bioluminescent marine Vibrio bacteria could start glowing simultaneously. “I’m sitting there thinking ‘Holy Smokes, how is…

For more than 50 years, Gerald Fink of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and David Botstein of Calico Life Sciences have made unique, and sometimes intersecting, contributions to genetics. Together they taught an advanced genetics course at MIT for more than a decade; they’ve co-authored a series of perspective papers and patents. Each has mentored dozens…