Michael Ashburner

Michael Ashburner
Michael Ashburner
Born	23 May 1942 (1942-05-23) (age 69)[citation needed] Sussex, England
Nationality	United Kingdom
Fields	Bioinformatics
Institutions	European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI), California Institute of Technology, University of Cambridge, University of California, San Francisco[1]
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Known for	Drosophila melanogaster[2] Gene Ontology[3] FlyBase[4]
Influences	Bruce Alberts[1]
Notable awards	Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal 2008[5], George W. Beadle Medal 1999[6], Benjamin Franklin Award (Bioinformatics) 2006, Accomplishment by a Senior Scientist Award 2011 [7][1]

Michael Ashburner FRS (born 23 May 1942) is a biologist and emeritus Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge^[8]. He is also the former joint-head of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

Born in Sussex, England, Ashburner attended High Wycombe Royal Grammar School from 1953 to 1960. He received his Bachelor of Arts in Natural Sciences Tripos (Genetics) in 1964, his PhD from the Department of Genetics in 1968, and was awarded a Doctor of Science in 1978, all from Cambridge^[9][10].

Ashburner was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.^[11] He received the Gregor Mendel Medal from the Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic in 1998, the George W. Beadle Medal of the Genetics Society of America in 1999, the Genetics Society Medal of the UK Genetics Society in 2005 and the Franklin Award of the Bioinformatics Organization in 2006.

Committees he has served on include the European Drosophila Stock Centre, Sweden, Board of Management 1978-1995. He also played an important role on the National Institutes of Health Oversight Committee, Drosophila Stock Centre in Indiana 1989^{[citation needed]}.

Research on Drosophila

Most of Ashburner's research has been on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster^{[2][12][13][14][15][16]}. Ashburner's career began in the early period of molecular biology prior to the development of most of the techniques in use today, as recombinant DNA, Northern/Southern/Western blotting. Nevertheless, by observing patterns of "puffing" in polytene chromosomes^[17], he established the existence of a cascade of genetic controls in the post-larval development triggered by ecdysone. The Ashburner model, of 1974, became a paradigm for metazoan gene regulation inasmuch as the Jacob-Monod model did for prokaryotes.

Ashburner was an early pioneer in the application of computers to biology. His contributions include his active participation in setting up FlyBase^[4] and the development of Open Biomedical Ontologies^[18] to allow machine-searchable annotation of biological information, particularly the Gene Ontology^[3][19] and ChEBI^[20]. He was also a member of the consortium that eventually sequenced and annotated the melanogaster genome. A prolonged effort by his laboratory to characterise the Adh region^[21] became invaluable for validating annotation strategies when large-scale genome information became available.

In Cambridge, Michael Ashburner and his colleagues have received funding on numerous occasions^[22][23] for their studies on Drosophila genomics and the development of a primer set to amplify fragments of genomic DNA highly desirable for chromatin IP, DNA binding and transcriptional profiling studies.

References

1. ^ ^{a b c} Michael Ashburner keynote: From sequences to ontologies - adventures in informatics at Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology July 2011
2. ^ ^{a b} Ashburner, Michael; Golic, Kent G.; Hawley, R. Scott (2005), Drosophila : a laboratory handbook (1st ed.), Plain View, N.Y.: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, ISBN 0-87969-706-7, http://www.cshlpress.com/default.tpl?action=full&--eqskudatarq=810 
3. ^ ^{a b} Botstein, D.; Cherry, J. M.; Ashburner, M.; Ball, C. A.; Blake, J. A.; Butler, H.; Davis, A. P.; Dolinski, K. et al. (2000). "Gene ontology: Tool for the unification of biology. The Gene Ontology Consortium". Nature Genetics 25 (1): 25–29. doi:10.1038/75556. PMC 3037419. PMID 10802651. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=3037419.  edit
4. ^ ^{a b} Ashburner, M.; Drysdale, R. (1994). "FlyBase--the Drosophila genetic database". Development (Cambridge, England) 120 (7): 2077–2079. PMID 7925011.  edit
5. ^ Spradling, A. (2008). "The 2008 Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal". Genetics 178 (3): 1123–1124. doi:10.1534/genetics.104.017832. PMC 2278087. PMID 18385103. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2278087.  edit
6. ^ Hawley, R.; Kaufman, T. (2000). "The 1999 George W. Beadle Medal. Michael Ashburner". Genetics 154 (1): 5. PMC 1460911. PMID 10681184. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1460911.  edit
7. ^ Mullins, J.; Morrison Mckay, B. (2011). "International Society for Computational Biology Honors Michael Ashburner and Olga Troyanskaya with Top Bioinformatics/Computational Biology Awards for 2011". PLoS Computational Biology 7 (6): e1002081. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002081. PMC 3107244. PMID 21673867. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=3107244.  edit
8. ^ "Michael Ashburner, Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge". http://www.gen.cam.ac.uk/research/ashburner.html. Retrieved 2011-07-29. 
9. ^ Ashburner, M. (2006). "Michael Ashburner". Current Biology 16 (22): R941–R943. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2006.10.010.  edit
10. ^ Jennifer Rohn (2006). "Sequencing, sushi and sang-froid. Michael Ashburner's account of the fly genome project". http://www.lablit.com/article/96. Retrieved 2011-07-29. 
11. ^ "Book of Members, 1780-2010: Chapter A". American Academy of Arts and Sciences. http://www.amacad.org/publications/BookofMembers/ChapterA.pdf. Retrieved 25 April 2011. 
12. ^ Sulston, J. (2006). "All for All". PLoS Biology 4 (6): e198. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0040198. http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.0040198.  edit
13. ^ Miller, Lewis F.; Michael Ashburner (2006). Won for all: how the Drosophila genome was sequenced / Michael Ashburner; epilogue by R. Scott Hawley; afterword by Ethan Bier. Plainview, N.Y: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. ISBN 0-87969-802-0. 
14. ^ Adams, M.; Celniker, S.; Holt, R.; Evans, C.; Gocayne, J.; Amanatides, P.; Scherer, S.; Li, P. et al. (2000). "The genome sequence of Drosophila melanogaster". Science 287 (5461): 2185–2195. Bibcode 2000Sci...287.2185.. doi:10.1126/science.287.5461.2185. PMID 10731132.  edit
15. ^ Teixeira, L. S.; Ferreira, Á.; Ashburner, M. (2008). Keller, Laurent. ed. "The Bacterial Symbiont Wolbachia Induces Resistance to RNA Viral Infections in Drosophila melanogaster". PLoS Biology 6 (12): e2. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1000002. PMC 2605931. PMID 19222304. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2605931.  edit
16. ^ Ranz, J. M.; Maurin, D.; Chan, Y. S.; Von Grotthuss, M.; Hillier, L. W.; Roote, J.; Ashburner, M.; Bergman, C. M. (2007). "Principles of Genome Evolution in the Drosophila melanogaster Species Group". PLoS Biology 5 (6): e152. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050152. PMC 1885836. PMID 17550304. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1885836.  edit
17. ^ Ashburner, M.; Chihara, C.; Meltzer, P.; Richards, G. (1974). "Temporal control of puffing activity in polytene chromosomes". Cold Spring Harbor symposia on quantitative biology 38: 655–662. PMID 4208797.  edit
18. ^ Smith, B.; Ashburner, M.; Rosse, C.; Bard, J.; Bug, W.; Ceusters, W.; Goldberg, L. J.; Eilbeck, K. et al. (2007). "The OBO Foundry: Coordinated evolution of ontologies to support biomedical data integration". Nature Biotechnology 25 (11): 1251–1255. doi:10.1038/nbt1346. PMC 2814061. PMID 17989687. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2814061.  edit
19. ^ Reference Genome Group of the Gene Ontology Consortium (2009). Bourne, Philip E.. ed. "The Gene Ontology's Reference Genome Project: A Unified Framework for Functional Annotation across Species". PLoS Computational Biology 5 (7): e1000431. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000431. PMC 2699109. PMID 19578431. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2699109.  edit
20. ^ Degtyarenko, K.; De Matos, P.; Ennis, M.; Hastings, J.; Zbinden, M.; McNaught, A.; Alcantara, R.; Darsow, M. et al. (2007). "ChEBI: A database and ontology for chemical entities of biological interest". Nucleic Acids Research 36 (Database issue): D344–D350. doi:10.1093/nar/gkm791. PMC 2238832. PMID 17932057. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=2238832.  edit
21. ^ Ashburner, M.; Misra, S.; Roote, J.; Lewis, S. E.; Blazej, R.; Davis, T.; Doyle, C.; Galle, R. et al. (1999). "An exploration of the sequence of a 2.9-Mb region of the genome of Drosophila melanogaster: The Adh region". Genetics 153 (1): 179–219. PMC 1460734. PMID 10471707. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1460734.  edit
22. ^ Grants awarded to Michael Ashburner by the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council
23. ^ Grants awarded to Michael Ashburner by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council

External links

• Michael Ashburner publications in PubMed
• Michael Ashburner profile on BiomedExperts

Persondata
Name	Ashburner, Michael
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	23 May 1942
Place of birth	Sussex, England
Date of death
Place of death