My current research is I'm continuing the project I started from when I was a postdoc and assistant professor at MIT. The process of dosage compensation is a chromosome wide process of gene expression that has to be set in place uniquely on the X chromosome. And having found the genes that are involved in doing that, we found recently the sequences on the X chromosome that are specific to how the complex finds the X chromosome and not other chromosomes. And we discovered, harking back to my old life, we discovered a series of motifs, some of which are enriched on X, some of which aren't, but they're clustered. It's clustered motifs in particular sites on the X chromosome that recruit in the master genes that are involved in turning on dosage compensation in hermaphrodites and setting the hermaphrodites state of sexual fate. And so that was a huge recent discovery of how the X is so unique compared to the autosomes.

And then we did an evolutionary comparison to the sister nematode C. briggsae from C. elegans. And we discovered the motifs in C. briggsae, those two species do not mate, they do not have fertile progeny. And we discovered that the motifs had varied, some had varied a lot, but one motif varied by a single nucleotide that made all the difference between whether the C. elegans dosage compensation complex could bind to it or not. And so, we were able to discover evolutionarily that a single nucleotide change would prevent the C. elegans dosage compensation complex from binding to the C. briggsae X chromosome. And we were able to switch that nucleotide and show that the complex could now bind. So, it's really a structural function analysis.

Yes. This is published, recently published.

Dr. Barbara Meyer is a genetics, genomics and development professor in the molecular and cell biology department at University of California, Berkeley. She also serves as an adjunct professor in the biochemistry and biophysics department at University of California, San Francisco’s School of Medicine and an HHMI investigator. Dr. Meyer completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University and began her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley and finished at Harvard University. During her post-doctoral work, she researched how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans at the Cambridge University Laboratory of Molecular Biology with Dr. Sydney Brenner.

Dr. Meyer received her Bachelor of Arts in Biology from Stanford University in 1971, her Master of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of California-Berkeley in 1975, and her PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Harvard University in 1979. She then began post-doctoral research at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology to research how chromosomes determined sex of C. elegans. After completing her work at the MRC, she established her first lab at MIT to further analyze sex determination mechanisms.

Dr. Meyer was a tenured professor at MIT until 1990 where she became a genetics, genomics, and development professor at the University of California-Berkeley. In 1995, she became a member of the American Association of Cell Biology and American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She also became an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in 1997, where she and her lab successfully identified the master gene involved in sex determination. This breakthrough has helped advance research on chromosome repression and X chromosome dosage compensation.

Dr. Meyer has received many awards for her work, including the Genetics Society of America Medal in 2010, the Francis Amory Prize in Medicine and Physiology by the American Academy of Arts and Science in 2017, the E.B. Wilson Medal by the American Society for Cell Biology’s highest honor for science, the Thomas Hunt Morgan Medal, and was also elected to the National Academy of Medicine all in 2018.