News

In the final year of the “Best Places to Work: Postdocs” ranking, Whitehead Institute has again come out on top. This is the fourth time in 10 years that Whitehead has emerged as number one—more than any other institution in the history of the rankings, published annually by The Scientist magazine.

A team of scientists from Whitehead Institute and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has added markedly to the job description of prions as agents of change, identifying a prion capable of triggering a transition in yeast from its conventional single-celled form to a cooperative, multicellular structure. This change, which appears to improve yeast’s chances for survival in the face of hostile environmental conditions, is an epigenetic phenomenon—a heritable alteration brought about without any change to the organism’s underlying genome.

The American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) is including Whitehead Institute Founding Member Robert Weinberg in its inaugural class of Fellows of the AACR Academy.

Whitehead Institute Founding Member Robert Weinberg is among 11 scientists to receive the new Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, intended to recognize excellence in research aimed at curing intractable diseases and extending human life.

Whitehead Institute and MIT chemical engineers and biologists have now devised a way to dramatically boost isobutanol production in yeast, which naturally make it in small amounts. They engineered yeast so that isobutanol synthesis takes place entirely within mitochondria, cell structures that generate energy and also host many biosynthetic pathways.

Whitehead Institute researchers report that 10 long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) play a vital role in the regulation of white fat cells. When each of these lncRNAs is individually knocked down, fat precursor cells fail to mature into white fat cells and have significantly reduced lipid droplets compared with white fat cells with unmodified lncRNA function.

Research from Whitehead Institute shows that transcription at the active promoters of protein-coding genes commonly runs in opposite directions. This leads to coordinate production of both protein-coding messenger RNAs (mRNAs) and long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) today announced that Whitehead Institute Founding Member Gerald R. Fink has been chosen as its President-elect for 2013.

Using only a computer, an Internet connection, and publicly accessible online resources, a team of Whitehead Institute researchers has been able to identify nearly 50 individuals who had submitted personal genetic material as participants in genomic studies. 

In an approach with the potential to aid therapeutic vaccine development, Whitehead Institute scientists have shown that enzymatically modified antibodies can be used to generate highly targeted, potent responses from cells of the immune system.