Andrew Fire

Andrew Zachary Fire (born 27 April 1959 Palo Alto, Santa Clara County, California) is an American biologist. In 2006 he received along with Craig C. Mello received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for a method by which genes can be selectively mute ( RNA interference ).

Life

Fire graduated in three years degree in mathematics at the University of California at Berkeley. At age 19, he moved to the Faculty of Biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he worked under the later Nobel Laureate Phillip Allen Sharp in the field of cell biology.

In 1983 he received his Ph.D. and then went to Cambridge in England to Sydney Brenner. In this he began his research on Caenorhabditis elegans. In 1983 he was assistant at the Department of Embryology of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Baltimore. Through experiments with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, he was able to prove with Mello in 1998 that the function of genes can be suppressed better than by gene-specific single-stranded RNA by the injection of double-stranded RNA molecules. In 2003 he went to Stanford University School of Medicine, where he conducted research at the Department of Pathology and genetics; He is a professor of pathology and genetics since 2004.

Awards

Publications

  • Andrew Fire, Siqun Xu, Mary K. Montgomery, Steven A. Kostas, Samuel E. Driver and Craig C. Mello: Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans. In: Nature. Volume 391, 1998, pp. 806-811, PMID 9486653 PDF
  • Nucleic acid structure and intracellular immunity: some recent ideas from the world of RNAi. In: Q Rev Biophys. 2006, pp. 1-7.
  • A. Fire, R. Alcazar and F. Tan: Unusual DNA structures associated with germline genetic activity in Caenorhabditis elegans. Genetics 2006.
  • D. Blanchard, H. Hutter, J. Fleenor and A. Fire: A differential cytolocalization assay for analysis of macromolecular assemblies in the eukaryotic cytoplasm. In: Mol Cell Proteomics. , 2006.
  • F. Moreno - Herrero, R. Seidel, SM Johnson, A. Fire and NH Dekker: Structural analysis of DNA hyperperiodic from Caenorhabditis elegans. In: Nucleic Acids Res Volume 34, No. 10, 2006, pp. 3057-3066.
  • ML Foehr, AS Lindy, RC Fairbank, NM Amin, M. Xu, J. Yanowitz, AZ Fire and J. Liu: An antagonistic role for the C. elegans homolog SMA -9 in Schnurri Modulating TGFbeta signaling falling on mesodermal patterning. In: Development. Volume 133, No. 15, 2006, pp. 2887-2896.
62645
de