Robert Anthony Martienssen (born December 21, 1960) is a British plant biologist,

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 ...

–

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is an American foundation established by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore and his wife Betty I. Moore in September 2000 to support scientific discovery, environmental conservation, patient care improvements ...

investigator, and professor at

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is a private, non-profit institution with research programs focusing on cancer, neuroscience, botany, genomics, and quantitative biology. It is located in Laurel Hollow, New York, in Nassau County, on ...

, US.

Education

Robert Martienssen attended

Emmanuel College, Cambridge Emmanuel College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. The college was founded in 1584 by Sir Walter Mildmay, Chancellor of the Exchequer to Elizabeth I. The site on which the college sits was once a priory for Dominican mo ...

, completing his BA in 1982 and continuing on to his

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in 1986 on the

molecular genetics Molecular genetics is a branch of biology that addresses how differences in the structures or expression of DNA molecules manifests as variation among organisms. Molecular genetics often applies an "investigative approach" to determine the st ...

of alpha-amylase

gene families A gene family is a set of several similar genes, formed by duplication of a single original gene, and generally with similar biochemical functions. One such family are the genes for human hemoglobin subunits; the ten genes are in two clusters on ...

common wheat Common wheat (''Triticum aestivum''), also known as bread wheat, is a cultivated wheat species. About 95% of wheat produced worldwide is common wheat; it is the most widely grown of all crops and the cereal with the highest monetary yield. Ta ...

, supervised by

David Baulcombe Sir David Charles Baulcombe (born 7 April 1952) is a British plant scientist and geneticist. he was Head of Group, Gene Expression, in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge, and the Edward Penley Abraham Royal Socie ...

. He received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship to travel to the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

where he was a postdoctoral researcher with

Michael Freeling Michael Freeling is an American geneticist and plant biologist. He is currently a professor in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology at the University of California. He is known for early work on maize anaerobic metabolism, developmental ...

from 1986 to 1988 where he showed that changes methylation of transposons could be associated with genetically heritable changes in the phenotype of corn plants. In 1989 he was hired as a principal investigator at

Research and career

Martienssen has made major discoveries relating to the way plants control the expression of their genes. Working with

maize Maize (; ''Zea mays''), also known as corn in North American English, is a tall stout grass that produces cereal grain. It was domesticated by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago from wild teosinte. Native American ...

yeast Yeasts are eukaryotic, single-celled microorganisms classified as members of the fungus kingdom (biology), kingdom. The first yeast originated hundreds of millions of years ago, and at least 1,500 species are currently recognized. They are est ...

and the weed ''

Arabidopsis ''Arabidopsis'' (rockcress) is a genus in the family Brassicaceae. They are small flowering plants related to cabbage and mustard. This genus is of great interest since it contains thale cress (''Arabidopsis thaliana''), one of the model organ ...

'', he focuses on the chemical modifications to

DNA Deoxyribonucleic acid (; DNA) is a polymer composed of two polynucleotide chains that coil around each other to form a double helix. The polymer carries genetic instructions for the development, functioning, growth and reproduction of al ...

that determine which genes are active — a process known as

epigenetics In biology, epigenetics is the study of changes in gene expression that happen without changes to the DNA sequence. The Greek prefix ''epi-'' (ἐπι- "over, outside of, around") in ''epigenetics'' implies features that are "on top of" or "in ...

. Martienssen's work explains the effect on plants of ‘jumping genes’, or DNA

transposable element A transposable element (TE), also transposon, or jumping gene, is a type of mobile genetic element, a nucleic acid sequence in DNA that can change its position within a genome. The discovery of mobile genetic elements earned Barbara McClinto ...

s, reported in 1951 by

Barbara McClintock Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992) was an American scientist and cytogenetics, cytogeneticist who was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University ...

, whom he worked alongside early in his career. He discovered that small pieces of

RNA Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a polymeric molecule that is essential for most biological functions, either by performing the function itself (non-coding RNA) or by forming a template for the production of proteins (messenger RNA). RNA and deoxyrib ...

, in association with proteins of the

Argonaute The Argonaute protein family, first discovered for its evolutionarily conserved stem cell function, plays a central role in RNA silencing processes as essential components of the RNA-induced silencing complex (RISC). RISC is responsible for the ...

family, silence transposons in seeds so that

gene expression Gene expression is the process (including its Regulation of gene expression, regulation) by which information from a gene is used in the synthesis of a functional gene product that enables it to produce end products, proteins or non-coding RNA, ...

remains stable from one generation to the next. His work was cited by the journal ''

Science Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...

'' as part of its ''Breakthrough of the Year: 2002'' feature on

small RNA Small RNA (sRNA) are polymeric RNA molecules that are less than 200 nucleotides in length, and are usually non-coding RNA, non-coding. RNA silencing is often a function of these molecules, with the most common and well-studied example being RNA int ...

s. He has extended his epigenetic studies from seeds to

pollen Pollen is a powdery substance produced by most types of flowers of seed plants for the purpose of sexual reproduction. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced Gametophyte#Heterospory, microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm ...

, and his discoveries have implications for

plant breeding Plant breeding is the science of changing the traits of plants in order to produce desired characteristics. It is used to improve the quality of plant products for use by humans and animals. The goals of plant breeding are to produce crop varie ...

— including hybrid cloning — and the development of

biofuel Biofuel is a fuel that is produced over a short time span from Biomass (energy), biomass, rather than by the very slow natural processes involved in the formation of fossil fuels such as oil. Biofuel can be produced from plants or from agricu ...

Awards

Investigator * Newcomb-Cleveland Prize,

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is a United States–based international nonprofit with the stated mission of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsib ...

in 2003 * Breakthrough of the Year, ''

'', 2002 * Elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

in 2006 One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from the royalsociety.org website where: * Elected a member of European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) in 2010 * McClintock Prize for plant genetics in 2018 *The

American Society of Plant Biologists The American Society of Plant Biologists (ASPB) is a non-profit professional society for research and education in plant science with over 4,000 members world-wide. It was founded in 1924, as the American Society of Plant Physiologists (ASPP). T ...

Martin Gibbs Medal in 2019

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Martienssen, Robert Anthony Alumni of Emmanuel College, Cambridge American geneticists Howard Hughes Medical Investigators Living people 1960 births