Dr. Sir Richard J. Roberts
1993 Nobel Laureate for Medicine at New England Biolabs in Ipswich/USA
Topic of Keynote Speech
Why you should love bacteria
Abstract of Keynote Speech
We live in a fascinating world surrounded by life. Much of that life is clearly visible like the plants and animals that we see every day. However, far more is invisible to the naked eye, and it is this realm, the microscopic world, that Dr. Sir Richard Roberts will discuss in his keynote speech. These unseen bugs can be friends such as the Bifidobacteria that we find in yoghurt or they can be our deadly foes such as Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that caused the Black Death that decimated Europe in the Middle Ages. This unseen world is fascinating and is far richer and more complicated than the macroscopic world of elephants and giraffes. These organisms live in and on our bodies as well as in every environment, even the harshest regions found on earth. They may also live elsewhere in the solar system! Without these bugs we would be unable to survive on earth and yet we know rather little about them. We don’t even know how many different kinds there are. Perhaps your skin will crawl just a little when you realize how many passengers, both friendly and unfriendly, are riding around with us and lying in wait in the oceans and jungles.
Short Biography
Dr. Sir Richard J. Roberts is a Research Director at New England Biolabs in Massachusetts/USA, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1993 for his discoveries of split genes and mRNA splicing. Being educated in England his postdoctoral research was carried out in Professor J.L. Strominger’s laboratory at Harvard, where he studied the tRNAs that are involved in the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. From 1972 to 1992 he worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, reaching the position of Assistant Director for Research under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972, and in the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and characterized in Dr. Roberts’ laboratory which sequenced the 35,937 nucleotide Adenovirus-2 genome and wrote some of the first programs for sequence assembly and analysis. Dr. Roberts’ current interest focuses on the identification of restriction enzymes and methylase genes within the GenBank database and the development of rapid methods to assay their function.
Long Biography
Sir Dr. Richard John Roberts is the Chief Scientific Officer at New England Biolabs in Massachusetts/USA, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1993 for his discoveries of split genes and mRNA splicing. These discoveries completely changed the way biologists thought about genes and led to decisive progress in many fields including cancer research.
Previously, based on studies of bacterial DNA, biologists believed that genes consisted of unbroken stretches of DNA, all of which encoded protein structure. It has since been established that the discontinuous gene structure discovered by Dr. Roberts is the most common structure found in higher organisms (eukaryotes). In addition to having important implications for the study of genetic diseases this structure is believed to drive evolution by allowing information from different parts of the gene to be brought together in new combinations.
Richard J. Roberts was educated in England, attending St. Stephen’s School and the City of Bath Boys’ School in Bath before moving to the University of Sheffield where he obtained a B.Sc. in Chemistry in 1965 and a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry in 1968. His postdoctoral research was carried out in Prof. J.L. Strominger’s laboratory at Harvard, where he studied the tRNAs that are involved in the biosynthesis of bacterial cell walls. A stay as a guest in Cambridge (GB), with Dr. Frederick Sanger (who in 1980 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the second time) directed him to the “technique” of RNA sequencing, and he succeeded in exactly determining the individual nucleotides within some tRNA molecules, beginning a passion for nucleic acid sequences.
From 1972 to 1992 Dr. Roberts worked at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, reaching the position of Assistant Director for Research under Dr. J.D. Watson. He began work on the newly discovered Type II restriction enzymes in 1972, and in the next few years more than 100 such enzymes were discovered and characterized in Dr. Roberts’ laboratory. His laboratory has cloned the genes for several restriction enzymes and their cognate methylases, and studies of these enzymes have been a major research theme.
Dr. Roberts has also been involved in studies of Adenovirus-2, beginning with studies of transcription that led to the discovery of split genes and mRNA splicing in 1977. This was followed by efforts to deduce the DNA sequence of the Adenovirus-2 genome, and a complete sequence of 35,937 nucleotides was obtained. This latter project required the extensive use of computer methods, both for the assembly of the sequence and its subsequent analysis. His laboratory pioneered the application of computers in this area, and the further development of computer methods of protein and nucleic acid sequence analysis continues to be a major research focus.
The field of DNA methyltransferases is also an area of Dr. Roberts’ active research interest, and crystal structures for the HhaI methyltransferase both alone and in complex with DNA have been obtained in collaboration with Dr. X. Cheng. The latter complex is remarkable as the protein causes the target cytosine base to flip completely out of the helix so that it is accessible for chemical reaction. This extreme, but elegant distortion of the double helix had not been seen previously. A major interest of Dr. Roberts at present is the semi-automatic identification of restriction enzyme and methylase genes within the GenBank database and the development of rapid methods to assay their function. Already several new specificities have been found, and it is clear that there are many more restriction enzyme genes in Nature than had been previously suspected.
Dr. Roberts is a Member of the Advisory Board of the International Peace Foundation since 2004, and he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2008. Most recently he has become one of the leaders of the COMBREX project that aims to connect computational biologists with experimental biochemists to find the function of novel genes. Bioinformatic studies of microbial genomes to find new restriction systems remain a major research focus as is the elucidation of DNA methyltransferase recognition sequences using SMRT sequencing. The latter is revealing that bacteria are far more sophisticated in their use of DNA methylation than had previously been suspected.
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