News

Acclaimed molecular biologist Susan L. Lindquist was today appointed director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. A pioneering researcher with an interdisciplinary bent, Lindquist comes to the Whitehead from the University of Chicago where she is the Albert D. Lasker Professor of Medical Sciences, a Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology, and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator. Lindquist succeeds Whitehead’s two previous directors, Nobel laureate David Baltimore and yeast genetics pioneer Gerald Fink.

Scientists have found the first evidence to show that even seemingly normal-looking clones may harbor serious abnormalities affecting gene expression that may not manifest themselves as outward characteristics. The findings, reported in the July 6 issue of Science by researchers at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and University of Hawaii, confirm the previous suspicion that reproductive cloning is not only inefficient, but may actually be unsafe.

In some of the strongest evidence yet to support the RNA world—an era in early evolution when life forms depended on RNA—scientists at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have created an RNA catalyst, or a ribozyme, that possesses some of the key properties needed to sustain life in such a world.

In an exciting new development, scientists at the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research have found that single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in northern Europeans—the single letter DNA differences that underlie disease susceptibility and individual variation—travel together in blocks that are much larger than previously thought. The finding has major implications for mapping disease genes and dissecting human population history.

Despite technological advances, two major problems continue to plague the field of animal cloning: few clones survive to term and those that do are often grotesquely large. The root of these problems has remained a mystery until now.

In an entirely counterintuitive result, scientists have found that nearly half of all genes related to the earliest stages of sperm production reside not on the male sex (Y) chromosome as expected, but on the X chromosome, a chromosome universally thought of as the female sex chromosome.

Whitehead Associate Member Jamie Cate and his West Coast colleagues reported on an exciting image of the complete structure, including the moving parts, of an important molecule called the ribosome. This image zooms in on an intact ribosome—large protein factories found in all cells—at a higher resolution than scientists have ever viewed before.

Researchers from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research have created the long-awaited animal model for Rett syndrome, one of the most common causes of mental retardation in females with an incidence of 1 in 10,000–15,000. The transgenic mouse model sheds much-needed light on the underlying mechanism of the disease and suggests a new reason for hope in the research toward therapies.

At the Whitehead Winter Lecture Series for High School Students, approximately 140 students from 40 area schools—and four students travelling from Singapore for the program—will hear about scientists’ efforts toward creating better therapies to combat HIV.

In a companion volume to the “Book of Life,” scientists have created the largest publicly available catalog of single letter DNA differences (SNPs)—1.4 million SNPs—with their exact location in the human genome. The SNP map promises to revolutionize both mapping diseases and tracing human history. Already, it is accelerating discovery of disease genes and providing a “fossil record” of human population history, which suggests that we are all descended from a small group of about 10,000 people.