| Citation | Distinguished for her work on an important component of eukaryotic chromosomes, the telomere. Telomeres form the natural ends of all eukaryotic chromosomes and are essential for their integrity and stability. Blackburn defined their DNA sequences, uncovered the similarity of the sequences in telomeres from diverse eukaryotes, and showed that functionally they are also conserved across species. She subsequently discovered a novel enzyme, called telomerase, which directs the synthesis of telomeres. She showed that this enzyme is a riboprotein and, by in vivo and in vitro experiments, that the RNA moiety of the enzyme contains a sequence that serves as the template for synthesis of repeat telomeric sequences. Thus, the telomerase is a specialized transcriptase in which the template is an essential part of the enzyme. Blackburn's contributions have solved an important problem in molecular biology concerning chromosome structure and function. |