Edwin Southern

Sir Edwin Mellor Southern ( born June 7, 1938 in Burnley, Lancashire ) is a British molecular biologist, who until 2005 worked Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford from 1985. He developed in the 1970s, a method for detecting a particular gene sequence in a complex DNA mixture, which was named in his honor as Southern blot and up to the present is one of the most important techniques in molecular biology research. The designations developed by George R. Stark laboratory methods for Northern blot analysis of RNA and Western blot assay for the study of proteins are a play on the name Southern blot.

Life

Edwin Southern was born in 1938 in Burnley and studied until 1958 Chemistry at the University of Manchester. Four years later, earned his doctorate at the University of Glasgow in biochemistry. Subsequently, he worked at the research station for low temperatures of the Antarctic research center in Cambridge. In 1967 he moved to the Mammalian Genome Unit of the Medical Research Council ( MRC) at the University of Edinburgh and researched there methods for sequencing of deoxyribonucleic acid ( DNA). On it goes, for example, the use of certain enzymes, the type II endonucleases in DNA sequence analysis back. From 1973 he developed in Edinburgh beyond the later named after him, laboratory method Southern blot with the different in a mixture of DNA molecules in a specific DNA sequence can be detected. He published in 1975 in the scientific journal Journal of Molecular Biology under the title " Detection of specific sequences among DNA fragments separated by gel electrophoresis " ( J Mol Biol 1975. 98 (3) :503-517). For the far-reaching spread of this technology also contributed to the fact that Edwin Southern would not let her patent protection.

Together with the Clinical and Population Cytogenetics Unit of the MRC at the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh, he initiated from 1979, the first project to map the human genome, through which he developed various technologies for separation, sizing and sequencing of DNA. In 1985, five years after his appointment as Director of the MRC Mammalian Genome Unit, he was Whitley Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Trinity College there. In 1988 Edwin Southern was instrumental in the development of DNA chip technology, which, in contrast to the Southern blot technique he applied for several patents and received. In 1995, he founded Oxford Gene Technology, for which he ( Chief Scientific Officer ) acts as President and head of science. Ten years later he became Professor Emeritus at the University of Oxford.

Awards

Among the academic and government honors received Edwin Southern for his scientific work, including the admission as a Fellow to the Royal Society in 1983 and was appointed a Knight Bachelor in 2003 and the award of the Gairdner Foundation International Award in 1990, the Royal Medal 1998 Albert Lasker and the Awards for Clinical Medical Research in 2005. He is also an honorary member of the Biochemical Society and nonresident since 1988 a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The University of Padua (1988 ), the University of Edinburgh (1991 ), Lund University (1995), Uppsala University (2003) and the University of Glasgow (2004) awarded him an honorary doctorate.