Elisa Izaurralde

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Elisa Izaurralde
Born(1959-09-20)20 September 1959
Montevideo, Uruguay
Died30 April 2018(2018-04-30) (aged 58)
Tübingen, Germany
Alma mater
Known forRNA transport, RNA metabolism, RNA silencing
Awards
Ulrich Laemmli

Elisa Izaurralde (20 September 1959 in

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, shared with Elena Conti, for "fundamental new insights into intracellular RNA transport and RNA metabolism".[2] Together with Conti, she helped characterize proteins important for exporting mRNA out of the nucleus[2] and later in her career she helped elucidate mechanisms of mRNA silencing, translational repression, and mRNA decay.[3]

Early life and education

Elisa Izaurralde was born in

Ulrich Laemmli.[4][5]

Career

After receiving her PhD, Izaurralde stayed on in Laemmli's lab for an additional year as a postdoctoral researcher before starting a second postdoctoral position at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg in 1990, working with Iain Mattaj.[6] It was here that she switched her focus from DNA to RNA and met biophysicist Elena Conti, with whom she would share the 2008 Leibniz Prize.[4]

In 1996, she returned to Geneva University, where she led her first work group as a junior research group leader in the Department of Molecular Biology.[4] In this position, she researched the mRNA export factor TAP-p15, before returning to EMBL in 1999, where she extended this line of research together with Elena Conti.[4]

Izaurralde worked as a group leader and later a senior scientist at EMBL before becoming Director of the Biochemistry Department at the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 2005.[4]

She co-organized numerous meetings and conferences including multiple meetings on translational control and non-coding RNA at

EMBL Symposia on "The non-coding genome," and the 2010 RNA society meeting.[6] She also served as an editor for a number of scientific journals including the FEBS Journal and PLOS Biology.[6] She was elected to the Board of Directors of the RNA Society in 2004. Beginning in 2020, the RNA Society began awarding the "Elisa Izaurralde Award for Innovation in Research, Teaching, and Service″ with the first awardee being Lori Passmore.[7]

Research

In order to make a protein, genetic information in DNA is copied (transcribed) into messenger RNA (mRNA) in the nucleus and then exported into the cytoplasm, where it is translated into a protein. Much of Izaurralde's early career focused on elucidating how this export occurs at a molecular level.[3]

Later in her career, Izaurralde shifted her focus to a different aspect of RNA biology: RNA metabolism – particularly how mRNA molecules are selectively silenced.[3] Her research in this area included studying mRNA silencing, in which microRNA (miRNA) molecules with sequences complementary to sites in the mRNA direct silencing machinery to the mRNA, as well as more general mRNA decay and transcriptional repression mechanisms, and how these processes are interconnected. She discovered a family of scaffolding proteins called GW182 that is important for helping the effector molecule carrying the miRNA (a member of the Argonaute family of proteins) recruit additional silencing co-factors including deadenylase complexes.[8][9]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

References

  1. ^ "Izaurralde, Elisa". mpg.de. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft.
  2. ^ a b c "Leibniz Prizewinners Announced". dfg.de. DFG, German Research Foundation. 2008. Archived from the original on 24 June 2013. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  3. ^ a b c "Elisa Izaurralde". eb.tuebingen.mpg.de. Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology. Retrieved 5 May 2018.
  4. ^ a b c d e f "Elisa Izaurralde, a prominent RNA scientist, receives Leibniz Prize". www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de. 14 March 2008. Archived from the original on 22 March 2019. Retrieved 4 May 2018.
  5. ISSN 1097-2765
    .
  6. ^ a b c Hoffmann, Ilire Hasani, Robert. "Academy of Europe: CV". www.ae-info.org. Retrieved 5 May 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  7. ^ "2020 Elisa Izaurralde Award Winner". Archived from the original on 28 May 2020. Retrieved 7 July 2020.
  8. ^ a b "Max Planck Director Izaurralde honored for groundbreaking research". www.gesundheitsindustrie-bw.de. 5 June 2012. Archived from the original on 15 August 2022. Retrieved 5 May 2018.
  9. ^ a b adit. "RNA life – from birth to death". 2012.the-embo-meeting.org. Archived from the original on 7 April 2016. Retrieved 5 May 2018.
  10. ^ Hoffmann, Ilire Hasani, Robert. "Academy of Europe: Izaurralde Elisa". www.ae-info.org. Retrieved 5 May 2018.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. ^ "Recognition and Encouragement". Science | AAAS. 12 July 2002. Retrieved 5 May 2018.

External links

Scholia has an author profile for Elisa Izaurralde.
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