STEPHEN J. ELLEDGE
Gregor Mendel Professor of Genetics and Medicine Harvard Medical School
Geneticist, Brigham and Women’s Hospital Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
COURTESY OF STEPHEN ELLEDGE
When he began a postdoc in Ronald Davis’s laboratory at Stanford University in 1984, Stephen Elledge wanted to develop new ways to knock out and mutate specific genes in mammals. His first experimental results contained a serendipitous artifact that laid the foundation for a scientific career studying how eukaryotic cells deal with damage to their DNA.
As a start to designing those gene-targeting tools, Elledge, now a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, began by trying to clone the mammalian homolog of recA, a bacterial gene required for DNA repair via recombination. Because there was no mammalian recA homolog, Elledge attempted to clone the Saccharomyces cerevisiae (baker’s yeast) homolog using a novel method that included an antibody step. The yeast gene Elledge cloned turned out to be RNR2, which encodes the small subunit of ribonucleotide reductase. This enzyme catalyzes the reaction that turns ribonucleotides into the deoxyribonucleotides needed to make new DNA. Elledge had used an anti-RecA antibody that inadvertently cross-reacted with the last four amino acids of Rnr2 in yeast. “It was a depressing day because I did not ...
