Robin Allshire | |
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Born | Robin Campbell Allshire 1960 (age 63–64) |
Alma mater | Trinity College Dublin (BSc) University of Edinburgh (PhD) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Epigenetics Heterochromatin Chromatin Centromere Kinetochore[1] |
Institutions | University of Edinburgh Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory |
Thesis | Construction and analysis of vectors based on bovine papilloma virus (1985) |
Doctoral advisor | Chris Bostock Edwin Southern[2] |
Other academic advisors | Nicholas Hastie |
Website | allshirelab |
Robin Campbell Allshire (born 19 May 1960) FRS FRSE FMedSci[3][4][5] is Professor of Chromosome Biology[6] at University of Edinburgh and a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.[7][1] His research group at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Cell Biology[8] focuses on the epigenetic mechanisms governing the assembly of specialised domains of chromatin and their transmission through cell division.[9]
Allshire grew up in the fishing village of Howth, Co Dublin 1960–1978.[citation needed] His parents were Arthur Gordon Allshire (1925-2012) who was a Pharmacist and Freda Margaret (née Schmutz; 1933–2014).[10][11] He was awarded his Bachelor of Arts degree in Genetics by Trinity College Dublin, in 1981[citation needed] where he was motivated by the inspirational teaching of David McConnell and colleagues at the Dept of Genetics to undertake post-graduate studies.[12] He subsequently joined the Medical Research Council (MRC) Mammalian Genome Unit at the University of Edinburgh where he obtained his PhD in 1985[2] under the guidance of Chris Bostock and Edwin Southern investigating the use of bovine papillomavirus as a chassis for mammalian artificial chromosome construction.[2]
In 1985 Allshire joined Nicholas Hastie's research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Edinburgh (formerly MRC Clinical and Population Cytogentics Unit) as a postdoctoral researcher where he discovered that mammalian telomeres are composed of simple repetitive sequences similar to those of unicellular eukaryotes[13] and that telomere length in blood cells shorten with age and are further eroded in cancerous cells.[14] This work resulted from following the fate of fission yeast (Schizosaccharomyces pombe) telomeres after introdroducing fission yeast chromosomes into mouse cell in collaboration with Peter Fantes.[15] In 1989 he took a position as an independent visiting scientist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) for 18 months before joining the MRC Human Genetics Unit as a junior group leader. While at CSHL he decided to switch his focus to investigating chromosomal elements in the genetically tractable fission yeast.[16] At the MRC HGU, Edinburgh (1990 - 2002), and subsequently at the Wellome Trust Centre for Cell Biology, University of Edinburgh (2002–present), he discovered that genes are silenced when placed within fission yeast centromeres[17][18] and telomeres,[19] and then utilised this gene silencing to gain fundamental insights into the processes of chromosome segregation,[20][21][22] and heterochromatin[23][24][25][26] and kinetochore CENP-A chromatin[27][28][29][30][31][32] establishment[33][34] and maintenance.[35][36][37] He is particularly interested in the epigenetic mechanisms that allow the persistence of specialised chromatin domains through multiple cell divisions and meiosis.[38] He has investigated how RNA interference (RNAi) mediates heterochromatin formation[39][40][41] and shown that splicing factors contribute to heterochromatin integrity via siRNA generation and RNAi.[42][43] He has provided insight into how transcription and resulting non-coding RNA might influence the assembly of specialised CENP-A chromatin[44][45][46][47] and demonstrated that some acts of lncRNA transcription are responsive to environmental stimuli and regulate neighbouring genes by transcriptional interference.[48][49] Recently using fission yeast his team discovered an epigenetic mechanism that allows fungi to develop resistance to antifungal drugs without alterations to their DNA.[50] This finding is important for understanding how pathogenic fungi become resistant to the limited number of available antifungal agents in both clinical and agricultural arenas.
Allshire was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2005,[51] a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2011 [4] and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (FMedSci) in 2020.[5]
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