Michael Levine (biologist)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Michael S. Levine
Nationality
AwardsNAS Award in Molecular Biology (1996)
Scientific career
FieldsDevelopmental biology
InstitutionsPrinceton University
University of California, Berkeley
University of California, San Diego
Columbia University
Doctoral advisorAlan Garen
Doctoral studentsAlbert Erives
Notes
Member of the
National Academy of Sciences
(1998)

Michael Levine is an American

cell biologist at Princeton University, where he is the Director of the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and a Professor of Molecular Biology.[1][2]

Levine previously held appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of California, San Diego, and Columbia University. He is notable for co-discovering the Homeobox in 1983 and for discovering the organization of the regulatory regions of developmental genes.[3]

Biography

Levine was born in

Yale, where he studied with Alan Garen and in 1981 received a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry.[4]

Levine joined the Princeton faculty in 2015, and had been a professor at

UC Berkeley after leaving UCSD in 1996.[5]

Discoveries

Homeobox discovery

Levine was a post-doc with

Walter Gehring in Switzerland from 1982 to 1983.[6] There, he co-discovered the homeobox with Ernst Hafen and fellow post-doc William McGinnis:[7]

After learning that

Drosophila genome. And we got 'em all. I mean, we got 'em all!" Far from being humble, Levine says, "We were like, 'We kicked your ass pretty good, didn't we, baby!' Those were the days."[3]

Discovery of the eve stripe 2 enhancer

Levine briefly returned to

repressors worked together to shape the expression of eve in the second stripe, and determined that the repressors shut down only their binding enhancers, leaving other enhancers free of repression.[3] Joseph Corbo said of the work,

"Before Levine's studies of even-skipped stripe 2, it wasn't clear how you generated spatially restricted patterns of gene expression from initially broad crude gradients of morphogens. I think that the even-skipped stripe 2 studies were the defining studies that showed how an organism can interpret those gradients and turn them into specific patterns of gene expression. To me that's Mike's crowning achievement."[3]

Discoveries in the ascidian Ciona

After earning tenure in only four years at Columbia,

Awards

Professional relations

Levine cites as a significant influence his instructor Fred Wilt (taking his developmental biology class "was probably the single most galvanizing experience I had in terms of defining my future goals"),

Christiane Nusslein-Volhard as "mentors [and] friends ... over the years".[8]

On choosing to become a research biologist, he described some family pressure to become a doctor ("Coming from a modest background, particularly a Jewish family, the pressure to become a doctor was intense"),[3]

Fellow biologist

gene regulation in simpler organisms ... [Those] two big discoveries had a very large conceptual significance for developmental biology and by extension for evolutionary biology."[9]

Notable papers


Notes

  1. ^ "Molecular Biology Faculty Michael Levine".
  2. ^ "LSI History".
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j Hopkin, Karen (March 1, 2007). "Fire Fly". The Scientist. 21 (3): 58.
  4. ^ a b c d UCSD Press Release, April 30, 1996.
  5. ^
    Wilbur Lucius Cross Medal
    is an honor presented each year by the Graduate School Alumni Association to a small number of outstanding alumni. The medal recognizes distinguished achievements in scholarship, teaching, academic administration, and public service–all areas in which the legendary Dean Cross excelled.")
  6. ^ a b "What have you got in common with a fly?", Science Museum, South Kensington, UK (last visited July 29, 2012).
  7. S2CID 4235713
    .
  8. ^ a b c d Mike Levine (Abstract), Current Biology, v.13, n.14, R545 (July 15, 2003).
  9. ^ a b Sean B. Carroll, quoted in Hopkin, Karen (March 1, 2007). "Fire Fly". The Scientist. 21 (3): 58.
  10. .
  11. .
  12. .
  13. .
  14. ^ "Michael Levine", Searle Scholars Program directory. (last visited July 29, 2012).
  15. New York Times
    , March 10, 1985.
  16. ^ "NAS Award in Molecular Biology" Archived 2012-07-22 at the Wayback Machine, National Academy of Sciences (Awarded for recent notable discovery in molecular biology by a young scientist age 45 or younger).
  17. ^ "Michael S. Levine", National Academy of Sciences Member Directory (last visited 2012 July 29).

External links

Seminars and Talks
Interviews (print and video)
Profiles