News

Acclaimed molecular biologist Susan L. Lindquist takes office as director of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research.

In two companion papers this week, researchers from the Whitehead Institute Center for Genome Research report important findings that set the stage for the next steps in the Human Genome Project—mapping and identifying all the genes that predispose us to common diseases. The studies, one by Mark Daly, Eric Lander, and colleagues, and the other by John Rioux and colleagues at Whitehead Genome Center, provide the impetus for building a “haplotype” map of the genome—a map that will make it easier, faster, and perhaps cheaper to find disease-causing or disease-predisposing genes.

For the first time, researchers at the Whitehead Institute have mapped the complete circuit of one of life's most fundamental processes—the cell cycle, which tells cells when to divide. This network diagram describes the genetic switches and connections that form the circuit common to a process found in all living organisms, from bacteria to human beings. The findings were published in the September 21 issue of Cell by Whitehead Member Richard Young and his colleagues.

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.