Thomas A. Bickle

Thomas Anthony Bickle ( born December 23, 1940 in Norfolk, England) is a British- Swiss microbiologist.

Life

Thomas A. Bickle studied biology at the University of Geneva. He received his doctorate in 1972 at the University of California at Davis, where he was then working as an assistant. His dissertation was entitled Studies on the Protein Composition of Ribosomes. A year later he came to the Biozentrum, University of Basel as part of a European Molecular Biology Organization long term fellowship. Here he was appointed in 1980 as extraordinary and in 1990 full professor of microbiology. In addition to his research and teaching activities Bickle also served as Chairman of the Biozentrum and as Dean of the Faculty of Science. He retired in 2005.

Work

Thomas A. Bickle research on the mode of action of bacterial DNA restriction and modification systems. These systems protect bacteria against the ingress of foreign DNA free form or packaged in bacterial viruses. So-called restriction enzymes ( endonucleases ) recognize foreign DNA and inactivate it by endonucleolytic cleavage. Bickle explained in Escherichia coli on the exact mechanism of how these enzymes between own and foreign DNA differ. He identified DNA recognition sites of various restriction enzymes and examined their structure. In addition, he demonstrated that many bacterial viruses possess a defense mechanism that prevents the restriction.

Awards

Publications (selection )

  • Spörel N., P. Herrlich, T.A. Bickle: A novel bacteriophage defense mechanism: the anti- restriction protein. In: Nature, 1979, 278, pp. 30-34, PMID 763 348
  • A. Meisel, T.A. Bickle, D. H. Kruger, C. Schroeder: Type III restriction enzymes need two inversely oriented recognition sites for DNA cleavage. In: Nature, 1992, 355, pp. 467-469, PMID 1734285
  • A. Meisel, P. Mackeldanz, T.A. Bickle, D. H. Kruger, C. Schroeder: Type III restriction endonucleases translocate DNA in a reaction driven by recognition site-specific ATP hydrolysis. In: EMBO J., 1995, 14, pp. 2958-2966, PMID 7796821
  • D. Panne, S. A. Müller, S. Wirtz, A. Engel, T.A. Bickle: The McrBC restriction endonuclease assembles into a ring structure in the presence of G nucleotides. In: EMBO J., 2001, 20, pp. 3210-3217, PMID 11406597
Dean (education)
771790
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