David P. Bartel is an American molecular biologist best known for his work on

microRNA Micro ribonucleic acid (microRNA, miRNA, μRNA) are small, single-stranded, non-coding RNA molecules containing 21–23 nucleotides. Found in plants, animals, and even some viruses, miRNAs are involved in RNA silencing and post-transcr ...

s. Bartel is a

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

Biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

, Member of the

Whitehead Institute Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research is a non-profit research institute located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States that is dedicated to improving human health through basic biomedical research. It was founded as a fiscally indep ...

, and investigator of the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization headquartered in Chevy Chase, Maryland with additional facilities in Ashburn, Virginia. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American busin ...

(HHMI).

Biography

Bartel earned his

B.A. A Bachelor of Arts (abbreviated B.A., BA, A.B. or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is the holder of a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the liberal arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree ...

degree in

biology Biology is the scientific study of life and living organisms. It is a broad natural science that encompasses a wide range of fields and unifying principles that explain the structure, function, growth, History of life, origin, evolution, and ...

from

Goshen College Goshen College is a Private college, private Mennonite Church USA, Mennonite Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Goshen, Indiana. It was founded in 1894 as the Elkhart Institute of Science, Industry and the Arts, a ...

in 1982 and his Ph.D. degree in

virology Virology is the Scientific method, scientific study of biological viruses. It is a subfield of microbiology that focuses on their detection, structure, classification and evolution, their methods of infection and exploitation of host (biology), ...

from

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

in 1993, under the mentorship of Jack W. Szostak. While in the Szostak lab, Bartel isolated the first ribozymes directly from random sequence, using ''in vitro'' evolution (among these, the Class I ligase). After he became independent at the Whitehead Institute, he further evolved this ribozyme to function as a RNA-dependent RNA polymerase to extend primers on external RNA templates, bolstering the "RNA world" theory. Bartel later shifted his research focus towards microRNA biology and in particular on understanding their regulatory functions. MicroRNAs are short pieces of RNA, about 22 nucleotides long, that dampen gene expression through the silencing of

messenger RNA In molecular biology, messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) is a single-stranded molecule of RNA that corresponds to the genetic sequence of a gene, and is read by a ribosome in the process of synthesizing a protein. mRNA is created during the ...

s (mRNAs). His lab was one of three that found that animals have many of these small regulatory RNAs, and he was the first to describe microRNAs in plants. Through his work with microRNAs, he developed a methodology that predicts their regulatory targets and created the web-based tool TargetScan, which makes these predictions available to the research community."Genome Res." 2009 Jan;19(1):92-105.
Most mammalian mRNAs are conserved targets of microRNAs
" Friedman RC1, Farh KK, Burge CB, Bartel DP. His research has also shown that most human mRNAs are regulated by microRNAs and that microRNAs predominantly act to decrease the levels of their mRNA targets. Bartel also discovered several other types of regulatory RNAs, including heterochromatic siRNAs, which silence DNA instead of RNA. In addition, Bartel is investigating the roles of long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) and how the untranslated regions and tails of mRNAs recruit and mediate regulatory phenomena. Bartel is a founder and a scientific advisor of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals, a company started in 2002 to advance “RNAi (RNA interference) therapeutics as a new class of innovative medicines”. In 2006, Bartel was placed second by Thomson Reuters in a 'citations' ranking in the field of Molecular Biology/Genetics. He has received several awards and was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, NGO, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the ...

in 2011.

References

External links

His Howard Hughes Medical Institute bioBartel Lab websiteTargetScanDavid Bartel Seminar: microRNAs
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bartel, David Living people American biochemists Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science faculty Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumni Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences Whitehead Institute faculty Year of birth missing (living people)