Laurence Hurst

Laurence Hurst

Laurence Hurst in 2015, portrait via the Royal Society
Born Laurence Daniel Hurst
(1965-01-06) 6 January 1965[1]
Ilkley, Yorkshire[1]
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Intra-genomic conflict and evolution (1991)
Doctoral advisor
Doctoral students Gilean McVean[6][7]
Notable awards
Website
go.bath.ac.uk/ldhurst

Laurence Daniel Hurst (born 1965)[1] FMedSci FRS[11] is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics in the Department of Biology and Biochemistry at the University of Bath and the director of the Milner Centre for Evolution.[12][13]

Education

Hurst was educated at Truro School[1] and completed his Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences (Zoology) at Churchill College, Cambridge, in 1987.[14] After a year at Harvard University he returned to the UK, and was awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Oxford in 1991[5] for research supervised by W. D. Hamilton and Alan Grafen.[5]

Career and Research

Hurst was a Royal Society Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge from 1993 to 1996 and has been a Professor at the University of Bath since 1997.[1]

His research interests[2] include evolution, genetics and genomics using computational and mathematical techniques to understand the way genes and genomes evolve. This has resulted in work on housekeeping genes,[15] gene orders,[16][17] and the evolution of drug resistance in Staphylococcus aureus,[18] Saccharomyces cerevisiae [19][20][21] and the evolution of sexual reproduction / sexual dimorphism.[22]

Hurst works on fundamental problems in the evolution of genetic systems, such as understanding why some sorts of mutations are less damaging than predicted whilst others are more damaging. Mutations that change proteins are, surprisingly, often not especially deleterious. Hurst showed that this was because the genetic code is structured in a way that renders it highly error-proof. Similarly, in applying network representations of gene interactions, he revealed why many deletions of genes have little effect and which deletions tend not to be recessive.[11]

By contrast, Hurst revealed that genomic changes often considered to be relatively harmless — such as gene order changes and mutations at ‘silent’ sites — are under selection for unanticipated reasons. He also showed how synonymous mutations can disrupt the way gene transcripts are processed. Similarly, in showing that genomes are arranged into gene expression domains, Hurst revealed that genes can affect the expression of other genes in their vicinity. As of 2015 translation of this fundamental work to medicine is a focus of his research.[11]

Awards and honours

Hurst was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015.[11] His certificate of election to the Royal Society reads:

“ Hurst is a leading authority on evolution of genetic systems. He showed that the genetic code is adapted to minimize errors, synonymous mutations in mammals are under selection and gene order is non-random. He was first to recognize the impact of gene expression levels on protein evolution. Hurst spearheaded novel approaches to evolutionary genetics deriving fitness from underlying biochemistry to predict the outcome of laboratory models. This led to fundamental insights into causes of gene dispensability, dominance and variation in gene family size. Hurst, collaborating with cell biologists, identified the human-specific pluripotency gene network and discovered human naïve stem cells.[23] ”

Hurst was awarded the Scientific Medal of the Zoological Society of London in 2003,[8] and elected a member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2004.[9] He was awarded The Genetics Society Medal in 2010.[10]

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 HURST, Prof. Laurence Daniel. Who's Who. 2016 (online Oxford University Press ed.). A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc. (subscription required)
  2. 1 2 Laurence Hurst's publications indexed by Google Scholar
  3. ↑ Hurst, L.; Hamilton, W.; Ladle, R. (1992). "Covert sex". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 7 (5): 144–145. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(92)90205-P. PMID 21235987.
  4. ↑ Hurst, L.; Grafen, A. (1990). "Sex and flagellation". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 5 (12): 419–422. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(90)90029-D. PMID 21232406.
  5. 1 2 3 Hurst, Laurence Daniel (1991). Intra-genomic conflict and evolution. (PhD thesis). University of Oxford. OCLC 556449138.
  6. ↑ McVean, Gilean Alistair Tristram (1998). Adaptation and conflict : the differences between the sexes in mammalian genome evolution (PhD thesis). University of Cambridge.
  7. ↑ "Students and post-docs past and present in the Hurst laboratory". University of Bath. Archived from the original on 2015-05-15.
  8. 1 2 http://static.zsl.org/files/2010-scientific-1161.pdf Zoological Society of London Scientific Medal Winners
  9. 1 2 http://people.embo.org/profile/laurence-hurst
  10. 1 2 http://www.genetics.org.uk/page/2775/2010-Genetics-Society-Medal.html 2010 Genetics Society Medal Archived March 15, 2012, at the Wayback Machine.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 "Professor Laurence Hurst FMedSci FRS". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-11-17. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where:
    “All text published under the heading 'Biography' on Fellow profile pages is available under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.” --Royal Society Terms, conditions and policies at the Wayback Machine (archived September 25, 2015)
  12. ↑ http://www.bath.ac.uk/bio-sci/research/profiles/hurst-l.html Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath Archived September 18, 2009, at the Wayback Machine.
  13. ↑ http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssldh/LaurenceDHurst/Home.html Hurst Laboratory of Evolutionary Genetics and Genomics
  14. ↑ http://people.bath.ac.uk/bssldh/LaurenceDHurst/CV.html Laurence Hurst CV
  15. ↑ Lercher, M.J.; Urrutia, A.O.; Hurst, L.D. (2002). "Clustering of housekeeping genes provides a unified model of gene order in the human genome". Nature Genetics. 31 (2): 180–183. doi:10.1038/ng887. PMID 11992122.
  16. ↑ Hurst, L.D.; Pál, C.; Lercher, M.J. (2004). "The evolutionary dynamics of eukaryotic gene order". Nature Reviews Genetics. 5 (4): 299–310. doi:10.1038/nrg1319. PMID 15131653.
  17. ↑ Weber, Claudia C; Hurst, Laurence D (2011). "Support for multiple classes of local expression clusters in Drosophila melanogaster, but no evidence for gene order conservation". Genome Biology. 12 (3): R23. doi:10.1186/gb-2011-12-3-r23. ISSN 1465-6906.
  18. ↑ Holden, M. T. G.; Feil, E.; Lindsay, J.; Peacock, S.; Day, N.; Enright, M.; Foster, T.; Moore, C.; Hurst, L.; Atkin, R.; Barron, A.; Bason, N.; Bentley, S. D.; Chillingworth, C.; Chillingworth, T.; Churcher, C.; Clark, L.; Corton, C.; Cronin, A.; Doggett, J.; Dowd, L.; Feltwell, T.; Hance, Z.; Harris, B.; Hauser, H.; Holroyd, S.; Jagels, K.; James, K. D.; Lennard, N.; Line, A. (2004). "Complete genomes of two clinical Staphylococcus aureus strains: Evidence for the rapid evolution of virulence and drug resistance". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 101 (26): 9786–9791. doi:10.1073/pnas.0402521101. PMC 470752Freely accessible. PMID 15213324.
  19. ↑ Papp, Balázs; Pál, Csaba; Hurst, Laurence D. (2003). "Dosage sensitivity and the evolution of gene families in yeast". Nature. 424 (6945): 194–197. doi:10.1038/nature01771. ISSN 0028-0836.
  20. ↑ Pál, C.; Papp, B.; Hurst, L. (2001). "Highly expressed genes in yeast evolve slowly". Genetics. 158 (2): 927–931. PMC 1461684Freely accessible. PMID 11430355.
  21. ↑ Weber, C. C.; Hurst, L. D. (2009). "Protein Rates of Evolution Are Predicted by Double-Strand Break Events, Independent of Crossing-over Rates". Genome Biology and Evolution. 1: 340–349. doi:10.1093/gbe/evp033. PMC 2817428Freely accessible. PMID 20333203.
  22. ↑ Hurst, Laurence D.; Peck, Joel R. (1996). "Recent advances in understanding of the evolution and maintenance of sex". Trends in Ecology & Evolution. 11 (2): 46–52. doi:10.1016/0169-5347(96)81041-X. ISSN 0169-5347.
  23. ↑ "Certificate of election: EC/2015/24". London: Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2015-12-20.
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/15/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.