“'Renaissance man' of evolutionary biology wins coveted ... - canada.com” plus 3 more |
- 'Renaissance man' of evolutionary biology wins coveted ... - canada.com
- UC Irvine's Francisco Ayala wins Templeton Prize - Los Angeles Times
- Key Enzyme A Master Regulator In Protein-Protein ... - Redorbit.com
- Scotland Takes On Synthetic Biology Bottlenecks - Genetic Engineering News
| 'Renaissance man' of evolutionary biology wins coveted ... - canada.com Posted: 25 Mar 2010 08:08 AM PDT Known among scientists as the Renaissance man of evolutionary biology, Francisco J. Ayala has won this year's prestigious, and lucrative, Templeton Prize for his life's work trumpeting the notion that science and religion are compatible. After being named the winner of the world's largest academic award at a news conference in Washington, D.C., Thursday, the California-based biologist and philosopher described the ever polarizing approaches to life as merely two windows into the same world. "I contend that science and religious beliefs need not be in contradiction . . . if they are properly understood," he said. While science looks at how the planets move, the composition of matter and the origin of species, religion focuses on the relationship between people and their creator, moral values and the meaning of life. "It is only when assertions are made beyond their legitimate boundaries that religion and science, and evolutionary theory in particular, appear to be antithetical," he said. Ayala goes a step further, asserting that the theory of evolution is actually more in concert with a religious belief in an omnipotent and benevolent God than the tenets of Creationism and intelligent design. "The natural world abounds in catastrophes, disasters, imperfections, dysfunctions, suffering and cruelty," he said. "People of faith should not attribute all this misery, cruelty and destruction to the specific design of the Creator. I rather see it as a consequence of the clumsy ways of nature and the evolutionary process." The annual award worth one million pounds sterling — about $1.5 million Cdn — honours the person who best "affirms life's spiritual dimension." But in a recent interview from Washington, the 76-year-old refused to discuss his own personal religious and spiritual beliefs for fear of criticism. "Whatever my answer is going to be will give reason to one side or the other to argue that the reason I take the position that I take is because I'm a believer or . . . I'm not a believer," he said. "The position that I take with respect to the dialogue and the compatibility is independent of what my faith would be, therefore, it should be acceptable to people of faith and to people who are not religious." Ayala said he plans to donate the entire prize to charity. Part of it will most likely go to the University of California, Irvine where the evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist has spent the last 23 years teaching and doing research. Noting both the National Academy of Sciences and the Center for Theology and Natural Science were behind his nomination, Ayala said he would likely give part of his windfall to those institutions as well. "It's a way of expressing my thanks," he said, adding the prize is indeed an honour and a testament to the many years he's spent writing and speaking to various audiences about the relationship between science and religion. "I have enough money from various funding agencies and my university to continue with my research. Fortunately I don't need it personally either." National Academy of Sciences president Ralph J. Cicerone nominated Ayala for the prestigious award. In doing so, he cited Ayala's more than 35 books and 1,000 papers as evidence of his broad academic influence. "A pervasive message of several of these publications is that science is a way of knowing, but it is not the only way," he said. "The significance and purpose of the world and human life, as well as matters concerning moral or religious values, transcend science." The son of the award's namesake further praised Ayala's research and development of new schools of thought into the fundamental questions of life. When it comes to faith and science, John M. Templeton Jr. said Ayala's work is very much in keeping with the goals of the prize. That is, the "belief that evolution of the mind and truly open-minded inquiry can lead to real spiritual progress in the world," he said. Born in Madrid just before the Spanish Civil War, Ayala grew up under the brutal and repressive regime of Francisco Franco. He attended Catholic school where he developed a passion for astronomy, physics and biology and though his business class family wanted him to pursue studies in economics and law, Ayala earned a physics degree from the University of Madrid in 1955. Ordained a Dominican priest while studying theology, he quit in 1960 and left for New York to pursue studies in genetics at Columbia University. He soon became a distinguished evolutionary geneticist and molecular biologist whose research led to a number of important discoveries. For example, his research led to the discovery that parasites responsible for Chagas, an often deadly disease found in the tropics, reproduce through cloning. Another recent study found malaria was likely first transmitted from chimpanzees to humans by a single mosquito just 5,000-6,000 years ago. In January, Ayala co-authored a paper that concluded gorillas and chimps may now serve as a "reservoir" for the parasites that cause human malaria, suggesting humans could always be subject to re-infection even if a vaccine is developed. As an adviser for the Human Genome Project, he pressed for part of the budget to be used to evaluate the ethical, legal and social implications of the project's results and is a proponent of embryonic stem cell research and cloning. Ayala is married to ecologist Hana Lostakova and has two children from a previous marriage. He also moonlights as a vintner having purchased a small vineyard as a weekend property in the 1970s. His property has since expanded to more than 2,400 acres and he now supplies a number of wineries with grapes. The first Templeton Prize was awarded to Mother Teresa in 1973, six years before the Indian missionary received the Nobel Peace Prize. Created by the late Sir John Templeton, a global investor and philanthropist, the prize value is always set to exceed that of the Nobel Prize. That decision is based on the belief that benefits from discoveries that "illuminate spiritual questions," count more than those from "other worthy human endeavours." The prize is the cornerstone of the Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization that funds research into "life's biggest questions" such as the "laws of nature and the universe and questions of love, gratitude, forgiveness and creativity." Past prize winners include evangelist Billy Graham and Charles Colson who started the Prison Fellowship outreach program after serving time for crimes related to the Watergate scandal. Renowned Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor won the coveted prize in 2007 for his efforts to prove that violence and bigotry could be resolved only by considering both their spiritual and secular dimensions. Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, will formally award this year's prize at a private ceremony at Buckingham Palace in May. Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| UC Irvine's Francisco Ayala wins Templeton Prize - Los Angeles Times Posted: 25 Mar 2010 08:08 AM PDT As a young doctoral student in the 1960s, Francisco Ayala was surprised to learn that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution appeared to be less widely accepted in the United States than in his native Spain, then a profoundly conservative and religious country. Ayala brought a unique sensibility to the topic, because he had been ordained as a Catholic priest before undertaking graduate studies in evolution and genetics. What he believed then, and has spent his career espousing, is that evolution is consistent with the Christian faith. On Thursday, Ayala, an acclaimed researcher at UC Irvine, won the 2010 Templeton Prize, awarded annually in recognition of achievements in affirming spirituality. The prize is worth $1.6 million, which Ayala said he would give to charity. In announcing the award, Dr. John M. Templeton Jr., president of the John Templeton Foundation, praised Ayala's research, which has focused on evolutionary genetics, as well as his inquiries into fundamental questions of life. "Ayala's clear voice in matters of science and faith echoes the foundation's belief that evolution of the mind and truly open-minded inquiry can lead to real spiritual progress in the world," Templeton said. In a telephone interview from Washington, where he was accepting the award, Ayala said he believed he was receiving it for his scientific work and for the "very important consequence of making people accept science, and making people accept evolution in particular." Ayala, 76, has been at the forefront of efforts to defend Darwin's theory from attacks by Christian fundamentalists, many of whom favor the notion of intelligent design, which is consistent with a literal reading of the biblical creation story and holds that the world is too complex to have evolved without oversight by a supreme being. He was the primary author of "Science, Evolution and Creationism," a publication of the National Academy of Science that attempted to boil down the argument in favor of Darwin. He also is the author of numerous other publications, including the book, "Darwin's Gift to Science and Religion," which expands on his pro-evolution argument and attempts to knock down intelligent design, which he says is either "bad science or not science at all." In the book, he argues that evolution "is consistent with a religious belief in God, whereas Creationism and Intelligent Design are not." This, he said, is because intelligent design suggests that the deformities of the world are God's design, whereas science shows them to be "a consequence of the clumsy ways of the evolutionary process." Ayala served as an expert witness in a landmark 1981 legal case that successfully challenged an Arkansas law requiring the "balanced" teaching of creationism alongside evolution in schools. He also has called for greater understanding of religion by scientists. Last fall, Ayala debated a prominent advocate for intelligent design, William Lane Craig, at the University of Indiana. Various Internet accounts suggested the evening was less than a triumph for Ayala. ("He got womped," wrote one Ayala sympathizer.) Ayala said he hadn't understood he would be debating and didn't believe a debate was the proper way to resolve the dispute anyway. In the interview with The Times, Ayala said he was taught evolution in Catholic schools in Francisco Franco's Spain. Later, during study for the priesthood at a Dominican seminary, he learned Christian concepts dating to St. Augustine about interpreting the Bible metaphorically. "The Bible is a book about religious truths; it is not how the Earth was made," he said. He added that he rejects the idea that one can read the Bible "as if it were an elementary textbook of biology or physics." Ayala was ordained a priest in 1960 but chose to leave the priesthood to study genetics. He has spent most of his scientific career at the University of California, first at Davis and since 1989 at Irvine, where he is a professor of both biology and philosophy. His research in recent years has focused on reconstructing the evolution of the parasitic protozoa responsible for malaria, with the hope of eventually laying the groundwork for a cure. "He's a major figure in the field," said UC Irvine colleague John Avise, who was Ayala's student during his own doctoral studies in the 1970s. "He was one of the early pioneers of molecular methods in population biology, so he got in sort on the ground floor of the molecular revolution that took place back in the 1960s and early 1970s." Colleagues invariably describe Ayala as a "renaissance man," who not only excels at biology and theology but is an avid opera lover and the owner of a large vineyard in Northern California, a remnant from his days at UC Davis. He continues to grow grapes for numerous wineries, as well as for his own small private label. Whenever wine is served at a biology department function, said colleague Brandon Gaut, "his expertise comes into play." The Templeton Prize was founded by John Templeton Jr.'s father, John Templeton, a pioneer of the mutual fund industry who died last July. The first prize was awarded to Mother Teresa of Calcutta in 1973 and later recipients have included the Rev. Billy Graham, Soviet dissident and writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, along with a number of prominent scientists. 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| Key Enzyme A Master Regulator In Protein-Protein ... - Redorbit.com Posted: 25 Mar 2010 05:37 AM PDT Posted on: Thursday, 25 March 2010, 07:40 CDT New research at Brown University explains how a key enzyme, PP1, functions in protein-protein interactions. In a paper published online in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, Wolfgang Peti has described how PP1 "chooses" proteins. The finding is important, because erroneous PP1 regulation can cause numerous diseases, including cancer, diabetes and Parkinson's. Protein phosphorylation is a process by which proteins are flipped from one activation state to another. It is a crucial function for most living beings, since phosphorylation controls nearly every cellular process, including metabolism, gene transcription, cell-cycle progression, cytoskeletal rearrangement and cell movement. Due to its importance in biology, scientists have wanted to learn more about protein phosphorylation and how proteins know when and how to become phosphorylated or dephosphorylated. Think of it like choosing the right dance partner who knows your moves so intimately that the choreography is seamless. Biologists have learned that interactions by kinases (enzymes that add a phosphate to a protein) are highly regulated. Each of the 428 human serine/threonine kinases interact only with certain substrate proteins, and they pick their "partners" unfailingly. But for the reverse reaction, called dephosphorylation (removing a phosphate from a protein), only about 40 phosphatases are available to interact with all substrate proteins. In fact, just one of them, protein phosphatase 1 (PP1), is believed to be responsible for up to 65 percent of dephosphorylation reactions. The question then is how PP1, a generalist, knows which substrate proteins to interact with. New research by Wolfgang Peti, the Manning Assistant Professor of Medical Science and assistant professor of chemistry, reported in a paper published online in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology, helps to answer that question. Peti and colleagues at Brown and Yale University have discovered that PP1 "chooses" proteins in dephosphorylation reactions based on which of its binding sites is available for the interaction to occur. The finding is important, because erroneous PP1 regulation can cause numerous diseases, including cancer (chromatin remodeling), diabetes (glycogen) and Parkinson's (LTP). "There are thousands of (peer-reviewed) papers out there, but nobody understood how PP1 is regulated," said Peti. "It is in fact a master regulator. We have identified now how it works." To obtain their results, the team showed for the first time how PP1 is bound to a regulator protein, spinophilin. Using nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography, the researchers examined the spinophilin-PP1 complex's structure. The scientists saw that spinophilin had attached itself to one of three substrate binding sites on PP1, called the C-terminal substrate binding groove. Examined at the atomic scale, it appears as if spinophilin is a many-tentacled beast that has woven itself into the C-terminal substrate binding groove, That leaves only two other binding sites, the acidic and hydrophobic substrate binding grooves. "Any substrate that needs the C-terminal is out of the game," Peti said. By narrowing the binding sites from three to two, PP1 is in effect becoming more selective, Peti noted. "What that means is PP1 is equally tightly controlled as kinases are," he said. "Now we know how PP1 is regulated," Peti added. "What simply happens is we don't create more enzymes. We create more protein complexes (holoenzymes) that increase the specificity of PP1." Rebecca Page, assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry at Brown, is a contributing author on the paper. In addition, Brown graduate students Barbara Dancheck, David Critton and Michael Ragusa assisted in the research. Angus Nairn, professor at psychiatry at Yale, contributed to the paper. The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. --- Image Caption: Research led by Wolfgang Peti of Brown University shows how a phosphatase called PP1 becomes more selective in protein-protein interactions. In the illustration, the phosphate spinophilin binds to one of PP1's three available binding sites, reducing the number of available substrates for other proteins. Credit: Wolfgang Peti, Brown University --- On the Net: Five Filters featured article: Chilcot Inquiry. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Scotland Takes On Synthetic Biology Bottlenecks - Genetic Engineering News Posted: 24 Mar 2010 12:48 PM PDT Nicolas Peyret The emerging and promising field of synthetic biology has attracted the attention of world-leading scientists for years. Simply put, synthetic biology aims to create novel biological systems and modify existing ones for useful purposes. It pushes the limits of genetic engineering by developing whole biosynthetic pathways and uses well-characterized systems to make engineering of biology easier and more reliable. Recently, Scotland made investments to address one of the field's major bottlenecks—DNA assembly. By understanding and harnessing the building blocks of DNA and the complex mechanisms that make up the planet's biochemistry—from bacteria's ability to breakdown and utilize food sources to plants' ability to synthesize vitamins—scientists from the energy, chemicals, as well as healthcare sectors recognize an opportunity to use natural systems found in biology to solve issues of global importance. Scotland and Synthetic Bio Over the past few years the scientific community's interest in synthetic biology has gained momentum. This is partly due to early successes such as the development of a biosynthetic way to produce anti-malaria drug Artemisinin, making the drug more affordable for developing countries. Much credit is also attributable to the growth of the International Genetically Engineered Machine (IGEM) competition, a global undergraduate event where student teams compete to create the best modified biological systems. Since its inception the number of teams participating in IGEM has grown from a handful in 2004 to 112 teams from 26 countries in 2009. Scotland is a country of five million people and has 14 major universities, several of which have expertise in molecular biology, engineering, bioinformatics, and connected disciplines such as systems biology, all at the heart of synthetic biology. The larger institutions such as the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow are organizing groups of researchers from different disciplines to work in synthetic biology and developing curriculum to train students in this growing field. In smaller institutions, a number of faculties in diverse areas are actively pursuing synthetic biology research and mentoring IGEM teams. Tackling the Challenges To capitalize on this expertise, in 2006, Scottish Enterprise, Scotland's economic development agency, performed an extensive market and technology analysis of the field and concluded that synthetic biology could impact multibillion-dollar markets worldwide and considerably transform sectors like energy, life sciences, and chemical sciences. It also suggested that synthetic biology would become the fastest growing segment in biotechnology, leading to significant company formation and job creation. The research also revealed, however, that much of the transformative potential of synthetic biology was restrained by several technology barriers. These include the development of well-characterized organisms that can be easily engineered (called chassis organisms), the characterization and availability of modular components, better models for regulatory circuits, new informatics tools for design, and new methods for DNA synthesis and assembly. In particular, assembly of DNA segments into longer fragments is central to building new biosynthetic pathways and, at the same time, represents a significant bottleneck. Current approaches are error-prone, resource- and time-intensive, and generally addressed at the individual laboratory or company level. In looking at the issue more broadly, Scottish Enterprise believed that investment focused on an intensive, short-term research program could quickly deliver a solution. By financing and designing such a program, Scottish Enterprise hopes to accelerate the development of synthetic biology while promoting Scotland's competitive edge in this field. After identifying interested research partners and organizing a subsequent workshop to define the scope of the program, Scottish Enterprise selected two organizations: Ginkgo Bioworks of Boston and Heriot-Watt University of Edinburgh. Ginkgo Bioworks is a start-up company founded by a team of four former MIT bioengineering students with the help of MIT's Thomas Knight Jr., one of the fathers of synthetic biology. Ginkgo brings to the program its expertise in biological engineering and bioinformatics as well as a focus on innovative approaches for DNA assembly reactions and associated informatics design tools. Dr. Will Shu's group at Heriot-Watt University consists of experts in microfluidic technologies and focuses on building a microfluidic platform to perform the assembly reactions developed by Ginkgo. In August 2009, Scottish Enterprise launched the £2.4 million (roughly $3.6 million) Genome Segment Assembly (GSA) research program. Scheduled to complete in early 2011, it will deliver the microfluidic platform for assembly of DNA parts into biosynthetic pathways. The platform will afford high-throughput combinatorial assembly of large DNA segments in a fast and reliable way and will be licensed to commercial partners in Scotland and the U.S. allowing them to offer assembly services. The Scottish licensee company will be the first firm offering this type of service in Europe, reinforcing Scotland's position in the promising area of synthetic biology. These companies will not only satisfy a clear need felt by academic and industrial researchers but also accelerate the pace of research in synthetic biology. Scottish Enterprise will host a panel session focusing on DNA construction at the upcoming BIO International Convention titled "From Oligos to Gene to Pathways to Genomes—New Challenges in DNA Construction for Synthetic Biology." Hand in hand with new technology comes a myriad of ethical, social, and policy issues, especially with a scientific discipline that deals with the repackaging of DNA from multiple organisms. Recognizing this, founders of the discipline have, from the beginning, worked closely with social scientists and ethicists to strengthen the field. Innogen, the Edinburgh-based ESRC Centre for Social and Economic Research on Innovation in Genomics, is a thought leader in this area. The potential of synthetic biology to revolutionize many different aspects of our lives is clear. There currently exist, however, many technological roadblocks. In particular, limitations in DNA construction prevent us from fully advancing this field. Scotland is committed to overcoming these obstacles and improving DNA construction technologies so that the field of synthetic biology can realize its potential to bring about diverse and exciting commercial opportunities.
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