BIOL 225: Biodiversity & Climate Change: March - Women's History Month

Charpentier is well known for her collaboration with Jennifer Doudna on decoding the molecular mechanisms of the CRISPR/Cas9 bacterial immune system. Charpentier is best known for her Nobel-winning work of deciphering the molecular mechanisms of a bacterial immune system, called CRISPR/Cas9, and repurposing it into a tool for genome editing. Her work on CRISPR has enabled scientists to edit the genome using Cas9.

Jennifer Doudna is best known for her work with CRISPR. She, along with her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier, were the first to suggest that genes could be edited or reprogrammed, now considered one of the most impactful discoveries ever made in the field of biology. For her work in gene editing, she has received numerous prestigious awards, including the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, the Gruber Prize in Genetics, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience and in 2016, she was runner-up for the Time magazine Person of the Year, alongside her fellow CRISPR colleagues.

Elizabeth is best known for her co-discovery of the telomerase, which is the enzyme that replenishes telomere. She and colleagues Carol W. Greider and Jack Szostak were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2009 for this work. Her research on telomerase has explored ways that mental health can impact physical health, investigating the impacts of meditation and social bonds.

Carolyn Widney Greider is an American molecular biologist and Nobel laureate. She joined the University of California, Santa Cruz as a Distinguished Professor in the department of molecular, cell, and developmental biology in October 2020. Greider discovered the enzyme telomerase in 1984, while she was a graduate student of Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Greider pioneered research on the structure of telomeres, the ends of the chromosomes. She was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, along with Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak, for their discovery that telomeres are protected from progressive shortening by the enzyme telomerase.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a German developmental biologist and a 1995 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate. Nüsslein-Volhard and her research partner, Wieschaus, identified genes involved in embryonic development by a series of genetic screens, generating random mutations in Drosophilia fruit flies using ethyl methanesulfonate. Her findings led to important realizations about evolution–that protostomes and deuterostomes, for example, are likely to have had a relatively well-developed common ancestor with a much more complex body plan than had been conventionally thought. The research greatly increased our understanding of the regulation of transcription, as well as cell fate during development is associated with the discovery of Toll, which led to the identification of toll-like receptors.

May-Britt Moser is a Norwegian psychologist and neuroscientist, who is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. She and her then-husband, Edvard Moser, shared half of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, awarded for work concerning the grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, as well as several additional space-representing cell types in the same circuit that make up the positioning system in the brain. Together with Edvard Moser she established the Moser research environment at NTNU, which they lead. Since 2012 she has headed the Centre for Neural Computation.

Yan Ning is a Chinese structural biologist and the founding dean of the Shenzhen Medical Academy of Research and Translation. She previously served as the Shirley M. Tilghman Professor of Molecular Biology at Princeton University where her laboratory studied the structural and chemical basis for membrane transport and lipid metabolism. Her research focused on the structure and mechanism of membrane transport protein, exemplified by the glucose transporter GLUT1 and voltage-gated sodium and calcium channels.

Margarita Salas Falgueras, 1st Marchioness of Canero was a Spanish scientist, medical researcher, and author in the fields of biochemistry and molecular genetics. She started developing molecular biology in Spain and also worked as an honorary associate professor of CSIC, at the Severo Ochoa Biology Center. Salas' discovery of the bacterial virus Φ29 DNA polymerase was recognized as the highest-grossing patent in Spain. Her cumulative work "invented a faster, simpler and more reliable way to replicate trace amounts of DNA into quantities large enough for full genomic testing."

Ada E. Yonath is an Israeli chemists Nobel laureate crystallographer best known for her pioneering work on the structure of ribosomes. In 1993 she visualized the path taken by the nascent proteins, namely the ribosomal tunnel. She discovered modes of action of over twenty different antibiotics targeting the ribosome, illuminated mechanisms of drug resistance and synergism, deciphered the structural basis for antibiotic selectivity. and showed how it plays a key role in clinical usefulness and therapeutic effectiveness, thus paving the way for structure-based drug design.

Masayo Takahashi is a Japanese medical physician, ophthalmologist and stem cell researcher and was Nature's one of “five to watch” global scientists for her groundbreaking work in regenerative medicine. Masayo and her research team used iPS cells made from a patient’s own skin cells and carried out the world’s first transplant of retinal cells from donor iPS cells. Time and cost used in the surgery has been significantly reduced by using super donor cells, cells derived from people with special white blood cell types that aren’t rejected by the immune systems of receiving patients.