MONTY RAKUSENSkirmantas Kriaucionis had been playing around with microscopes since his school days. But it was during a project with DNA methylation researcher Saulius Klimasauskas at Vilnius University in his native Lithuania that Kriaucionis got a real chance to dive into biological research. “The work was really exciting,” he says. “My interest in it has continued throughout my life.”
After relocating to the University of Edinburgh in 2000, Kriaucionis began a PhD with geneticist Adrian Bird on MeCP2, a protein that binds to methylated DNA. “It was a very exciting period to work on MeCP2,” Kriaucionis recalls—Bird’s lab had just developed a knockout mouse model, and mutations in the MECP2 gene had recently been linked to Rett syndrome in humans. With Bird, Kriaucionis identified a previously overlooked isoform of the protein that accounted for more than 90 percent of MeCP2 in mouse brains.
Kriaucionis earned his PhD in 2004, and, after a one-year postdoc at Edinburgh, moved to neuroscientist Nathaniel Heintz’s lab at Rockefeller University in 2006. There, he identified a new type of DNA methylation, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), occurring at high levels in neurons ...
