And we also collaborated with Job Dekker to look at the structure of the X chromosome.

What we had discovered early on was that the dosage compensation complex actually was a complex of proteins that were related to a complex of proteins that was being co-discovered, called condensing. It wasn't called condensing at the time, but one of the first discoveries when I was at Berkeley was that one of the dosage compensation genes that I had found controlled both dosage compensation but also controlled chromosome segregation. So, I thought if a protein could do both, it must be involved in chromosome structure. It turned out that was one of the founding members of a famous condensing complex. And so, the rest of the dosage compensation complex that is responsible for the activity is actually condensed in subunits. So, we were able to make that connection and that made me want to understand the connection between changes in chromosome shape, chromosome wide changes in shape, and how that would affect gene expression. So, we're carrying that out now and we've discovered a lot of different things about the relationship between chromosome structure and gene expression. And so, we're pursuing that and we're pursuing detailed mechanisms for how you control expression across an entire chromosome. And we're doing all sorts of modern techniques to set up assays in vitro to track.

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.