Robert Martiennsen on RNA Interference
  Robert Martiennsen     Biography    
Recorded: 20 Feb 2001

Another area of research that has come out of that same study of stem cell mutants are mutants that are involved—and we were surprised by this—in a thing called RNA-i. RNA interference is a relatively new phenomenon in animals, though it's actually been known in plants for a rather long time. Some of the mutants that we discovered in stem cell function turned out to be genes that controlled RNA interference. RNA interference is an epigenetic mechanism. It is an epigenetic mechanism that influences the genome as a whole and we're now using genome technology, like micro arrays for example, and the genome sequence in Arabidopsis to start to ask questions about how it has the impact that it does on development.

Dr. Robert Martiennsen is a plant biologist, Howard Hughes Medical Institute-Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation investigator, and professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Martiennsen attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge, completing his BA in 1982 and continuing on to his PhD in 1986 on the molecular genetics of alpha-amylase gene families in common wheat. He received an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship with University of California, Berkeley. In 1989, he was hired as a principal investigator at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. As a young scientist, he worked closely with Barbara McClintock. His awards and honors include the Newcomb Cleveland Prize, McClintock Prize, and Science’s Breakthrough of the Year in 2002 and the Kumho International Science Award in Plant Biology and Biotechnology (2001).