Michael Ashburner

Michael Ashburner (born May 23 1942, Sussex, England) is professor of biology in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge and is the former joint-head of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL).

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Ashburner received B.A. in Natural Sciences Tripos (Genetics) in 1964, his Ph.D. from the Department of Genetics in 1968, and was awarded a Sc.D. in 1978, all from Cambridge.

Ashburner received the G.J. Mendel Medal from the Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic in 1998, the George W. Beadle Medal of the Genetics Society of America in 1999, the Genetics Society Medal of the UK Genetics Society in 2005 and the Franklin Award of the Bioinformatics Organization in 2006. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Committees he has served on include the European Drosophila Stock Centre, Sweden, Board of Management 1978-1995. He also played an important role on the NIH Oversight Committee, Drosophila Stock Centre in Indiana 1989.

Research on Drosophila

Drosophila melanogaster has been extensively used as a model organism for the study of genetics. It has more recently become invaluable in the study of the genetics of development owing to the pioneering work of Edward B. Lewis, Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric F. Wieschaus.

Most of his research has been on the model organism Drosophila melanogaster. Ashburner's career began in the early period of molecular biology prior to the development of most of the techniques in use today, as recombinant DNA, Northern/Southern/Western blotting. Nevertheless, by observing patterns of "puffing" in polytene chromosomes, he established the existence of a cascade of genetic controls in the post-larval development triggered by ecdysone. The Ashburner model, of 1974, became a paradigm for metazoan gene regulation inasmuch as the Jacob-Monod model did for prokaryotes.

Ashburner was an early pioneer in the application of computers to biology. His contributions include his active participation in setting up Flybase and the development of ontologies to allow machine-searchable annotation of biological information, particularly the Gene ontology. He was also a member of the consortium that eventually sequenced and annotated the melanogaster genome. A prolonged effort by his laboratory to characterise the Adh region became invaluable for validating annotation strategies when large-scale genome information became available.

In Cambridge, Michael Ashburner and his colleagues have received funding on numerous occasions for their studies on Drosophila genomics and the development of a primer set to amplify fragments of genomic DNA highly desirable for chromatin IP, DNA binding and transcriptional profiling studies.

Further reading

• Ashburner, M., Chihara, C., Meltzer, P. and Richards, G.; Temporal control of puffing activity in polytene chromosomes. Cold Spring Harbor Symp. Quant. Biol. 38: 655-662. (1974)
• Ashburner, M., Golic, K. and Hawley, S.H. "Drosophila: A Laboratory Handbook". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, New York (2005).
• Ashburner, M. "Won for All: How the Drosophila Genome was Sequenced". Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, New York (2006).