Citation | Professor Bryan Turner, Professor of Experimental Genetics, School of Cancer Sciences, Institute of Biomedical Research, University of Birmingham
Bryan Turner pioneered the use of antibodies as reagents for research into chromatin and gene expression. He was the first to use synthetic peptides to raise antisera against histones post-translationally acetylated at specific amino acids and showed that these were uniquely powerful reagents for determining the chromosomal distribution of histone modifications. His demonstration that acetylation of a specific lysine on histone H4 marked up-regulated gene transcription on the Drosophila male X chromosome opened the way to a functional understanding of the histone marks. These novel tools allowed him to link histone deacetylation to gene silencing via the discovery that chromosome-wide histone deacetylation distinguishes the inactive X chromosome in female mammals. This and later work highlighted the central importance for silencing of histone deacetylases and their partner proteins. Pursuing a long-standing interest in dosage compensation, Turner recently showed that genes on the active X chromosome in male and female mice are transcriptionally hyperactive relative to non-sex chromosomes, a result that necessitates a change to the current paradigm.
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