Alan Coulson (born 1947) is a British biotechnology pioneer and

genome In the fields of molecular biology and genetics, a genome is all the genetic information of an organism. It consists of nucleotide sequences of DNA (or RNA in RNA viruses). The nuclear genome includes protein-coding genes and non-coding ge ...

scientist. He is best known for his work on developing

DNA sequencing DNA sequencing is the process of determining the nucleic acid sequence – the order of nucleotides in DNA. It includes any method or technology that is used to determine the order of the four bases: adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine. Th ...

technologies with

Frederick Sanger Frederick Sanger (; 13 August 1918 – 19 November 2013) was an English biochemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry twice. He won the 1958 Chemistry Prize for determining the amino acid sequence of insulin and numerous other p ...

and his contributions to the ''

Caenorhabditis elegans ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''rhabditis'' (ro ...

'' and

human genome projects Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, ...

Biography

Alan Coulson was born in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

in 1947 and as a youth attended the Cambridge Grammar School for Boys and subsequently the Deacon's School in Peterborough. He achieved his

higher national diploma Higher National Diploma (HND), part of the Higher Nationals suite of qualifications, is an academic higher education qualification in the United Kingdom and various other countries. They were first introduced in England and Wales in 1920 alongsi ...

in Applied Biology from

Leicester Polytechnic De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) is a public university in the city of Leicester, England. It was established in accordance with the Further and Higher Education Act in 1992 as a degree awarding body. The name De Montfort University was ta ...

in 1967. Under the mentorship of

John Sulston Sir John Edward Sulston (27 March 1942 – 6 March 2018) was a British biologist and academic who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cell lineage and genome of the worm ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' in 2002 with ...

, Coulson completed his PhD titled ''The Physical Map of the C. elegans Genome,'' in 1994.

Career

Coulson joined Sanger's group at the Medical Research Council’s

Laboratory of Molecular Biology The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...

(LMB) as a technician in 1967, shortly after receiving his diploma. With Sanger, Coulson developed many of the early

technologies, including the DNA polymerase primed synthesis ("plus and minus") technique and, eventually,

dideoxynucleotide Dideoxynucleotides are chain-elongating inhibitors of DNA polymerase, used in the Sanger method for DNA sequencing. They are also known as 2',3' because both the 2' and 3' positions on the ribose lack hydroxyl groups, and are abbreviated as '' ...

chain-terminating sequencing, which was later termed

Sanger sequencing Sanger sequencing is a method of DNA sequencing that involves electrophoresis and is based on the random incorporation of chain-terminating dideoxynucleotides by DNA polymerase during in vitro DNA replication. After first being developed by Frederi ...

. Sanger readily acknowledged Coulson's contributions to the development of DNA sequencing technologies, describing him as "my main collaborator in the later DNA work". After Sanger's retirement in 1983, Coulson contributed to the physical mapping and

genome sequencing Whole genome sequencing (WGS), also known as full genome sequencing, complete genome sequencing, or entire genome sequencing, is the process of determining the entirety, or nearly the entirety, of the DNA sequence of an organism's genome at a ...

project of the nematode ''

C. elegans ''Caenorhabditis elegans'' () is a free-living transparent nematode about 1 mm in length that lives in temperate soil environments. It is the type species of its genus. The name is a blend of the Greek ''caeno-'' (recent), ''rhabditis'' (r ...

,'' led by

and

Bob Waterston Robert Hugh "Bob" Waterston, (born September 17, 1943) is an American biologist. He is best known for his work on the Human Genome Project, for which he was a pioneer along with John Sulston. Education Waterston attended Princeton as an undergrad ...

at the LMB and subsequently the

Sanger Centre The Wellcome Sanger Institute, previously known as The Sanger Centre and Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, is a non-profit British genomics and genetics research institute, primarily funded by the Wellcome Trust. It is located on the Wellcome Ge ...

. This effort was the first to produce the complete genome sequence of an animal. Coulson later contributed to the human genome project. Coulson left the Sanger Center (by then renamed the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute) in 2003 and returned to work at the LMB until his retirement in 2007.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Coulson, Alan Living people 1947 births English geneticists Scientists from Cambridge Alumni of Leicester Polytechnic Human Genome Project scientists Medical Research Council (United Kingdom) people