- Susumu Ohno
Susumu Ohno (
February 1 ,1928 –January 13 ,2000 ), was an Asian Americangeneticist andevolutionary biologist , and seminal researcher in the field ofmolecular evolution .Biography
Susumu Ohno was born of Japanese parents in
Seoul ,Korea , on February 1, 1928. The second of five children, he was the son of the minister of education of the Japanese Viceroyship of Korea. The family returned to Japan after the war in 1945. Later he became a citizen of theUnited States of America . Susumu Ohno married Midori Aoyama in 1951. They had two sons and one daughter.His passion for science derived from his life-long love of horses. He earned a Ph.D. in veterinary science at Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology in 1949, and later a Ph.D. and D.Sc. from Hokkaido University. He went to the United States in 1951, as a visiting scholar to UCLA, and in 1952 joined the new research department at City of Hope Medical Center, where he remained in active research until 1996.
Scientific contributions
Ohno postulated that
gene duplication plays a major role in evolution in his classic book "Evolution by Gene Duplication" (1970) cite book
author=Susumu Ohno
year=1970
title=Evolution by gene duplication
publisher=Springer-Verlag
id=ISBN 0-04-575015-7] . While subsequent research has overwhelmingly confirmed the key role of gene duplication inmolecular evolution , research to evaluate Ohno's model for the preservation of duplicate genes (now termed "neofunctionalization") is ongoing and very active. He also discovered in 1956 that theBarr body of mammalian female nuclei was in fact a condensed X chromosome cite journal
author=Ohno S, Kaplan WD, Kinosita R
title=Formation of the sex chromatin by a single X-chromosome in liver cells of Rattus norvegicus.
journal=Experimental cell research
year=1959
pages=415-418
volume=18
url=
pmid=14428474] . In "Evolution by Gene Duplication", he also suggested thatvertebrate genome is the result of one or more entiregenome duplications ; variations of this idea have come to be known as the2R hypothesis (also called "Ohno's hypothesis").ee also
*
Gene duplication
*Barr body
*paleopolyploidy References
External links
* [http://www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/biomems/sohno.html Biographical memoir by Ernest Beutler]
* [http://content.karger.com/ProdukteDB/produkte.asp?Aktion=ShowPDF&ProduktNr=224037&Ausgabe=225343&ArtikelNr=14946&filename=14946.pdf Biography by Ulrich Wolf]
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