|
 Curently online :
5 |
|
 Total visitors :
7516780 |
|
|
Profile of stephen beverley
Wednesday, 2017/01/04 | 07:51:10
|
|
Figure: Stephen Beverley. Image courtesy of E. Holland Durando (Washington University, St. Louis).
During high school, Stephen M. Beverley attended a Science Day event at the California Institute of Technology. As he explored research laboratories, he felt that the entire world of science was open to him. “It just seemed like a candy shop,” he says. Beverley’s inquisitive pursuit of scientific truth has led him to study the factors that make the parasite Leishmania a devastating human scourge. Now, as Chair of the Department of Molecular Microbiology and Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Beverley, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, investigates how viruses influence Leishmania and how those viruses may be brought under control. Discovering LeishmaniaBeverley received his doctorate in 1979 and began looking for postdoctoral fellowships in the San Francisco Bay Area to stay close to fellow Berkeley graduate student Deborah Dobson, whom he would later marry.
Beverley attended a seminar given by Robert Schimke of Stanford University, who described how tumor cells offset drug activity by overproducing proteins through gene amplification. Beverley was intrigued and approached Schimke about the possibility of joining his laboratory. “He seemed moderately interested, but when he heard I’d been through Leroy Hood’s lab at Caltech he said ‘Okay, you’re in!’”
Beverley worked for more than a year trying to apply gene amplification to insecticide resistance, but with little success. Looking for a new direction, he worked on side projects, but struggled to find a project that captured his interest.
From time to time, Schimke would walk down the hall of his laboratory, looking for people to work on various projects or problems that his colleagues had brought to him. “One day he went walking down the hall saying ‘Does anybody want to work on Leishmania?’” Beverley says. “Nobody bit, and he stuck his head in my bay.” Schimke explained that Beverley’s gene-amplification skills could come in handy in a colleague’s study of a chemotherapy target enzyme produced by a Leishmania mutant. Beverley was intrigued by the evolutionary aspect of the project and asked “‘By the way, what’s Leishmania?’ Schimke says, ‘Oh, it’s a parasite,’ gives me a little smile, and walks out the door.”
Beverley read everything he could on Leishmania. “They were very interesting creatures, causing devastating disease outside of the US” he says. “No one was working on them. I had the perfect set of tools and a whole set of interesting new questions. I was hooked.”
Leishmania is a single-celled parasite transmitted through biting insects, like sand flies. The parasite can cause the disease Leishmaniasis, which has several forms, ranging from skin sores and ulcers to internal organ damage.
Beverley found that the amplified DNA molecules in Leishmania were circular (4), a finding that offered insight into their origin and function. He explored similarities between the origin of the amplified DNA in Leishmania and tumor genes frequently amplified in human tumors, work he would continue at Harvard University.
See more: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/52/14875.full PNAS December 27 2016 |
Back
Print
View: 509
|
|
[ Other News ]___________________________________________________
|
(16).png "Profile of stephen beverley")
